just imagine what it's like to feel like you need to preserve your modesty at the cost of excruciating pain or death in order to be safe living every day with that feeling is more painful in the long run than any chemical burn
@@Dino14345 I give myself about a 5% chance of actually using a safety shower in front of anyone unless my arm is actually falling off, or if shit is in my eyes. So that fuckin modesty curtain thing would be ridiculously reassuring
Remember: Even if you have to strip down completely heck-naked to prevent chemical burns, _that's better than having to go to the hospital because of chemical burns_
Chem class in 11th grade. Our teacher had a phD but lacked almost all teaching skills. One day, he was holding a bottle with some liquid, went around in class, opened it and let a student take a sniff. "It's bromine - just a little toxic haha" Were his following words. Dude definitely sniffed too many chemicals in his career.
Info to add: the teacher giggled as if he just had played an epic prank on someone instead of exposing a student to toxic gas. Same teacher, same year, new story. He wanted to demonstrate some reaction and explained that there's a chance it might explode. Can't remember which one it was but come one there are only like a few reactions that can explode. So, right in front on the teacher's desk were student's tables and two boys (about 16 yrs old) sitting there - their faces in line of the test tube that was about to be heated. Teacher explained semi-giggling what could happen but it sure won't - in his words. For that reason, there was a retractable pane of glass which was usually down. He pulled it up, explained again what could happen and then... not kidding... pushed it DOWN cause he was sure nothing would happen. The boys paniced and pulled the pane up. Teacher pushed it down. Boys pulled it up again. Felt like sketch that ended with - who would have guessed? - an explosion only caught by the damn pane of glass. 70's chem phd people be different.
My inorganics prof also opened a bottle of bromine during one of his lectures. for maybe 2s, because he could not bear the stink any longer. 5min later the stink made its way to me and this is why I know how bromine smells. like a very bad troll fart.
when i was in uni, we were working with chloroacetic acid. my stupid ass brain, for no apparent reason, after seeing the lab teacher talking about this white salt-like powder and heard chlor-something acet-something thought that we were talking about sodium acetate. i took a plastic square tray, and weighted the substance (that was indeed chloroacetic acid) i took it back to my place and said to my lab mate that i took the sodium acetate we needed. he, who has a functioning brain, noticed that i made a mistake and asked me to throw the sodium acetate, and i simply ate the whole content of the plastic tray because sodium acetate has a decent taste and i wanted to impress him with my braveness. The taste wasn't that bad and at first i thought i actually just ate sodium acetate. After some minutes my brain had a spark of intelligence, wich is rare, and told me that sodium acetate should be a basic-dissociation-salt but the powder had instead a really acidic taste. I then realized what just happened and discovered on pubchem that chloroacetic acid is really toxic and actually deadly if enough of it is ingested. i induced myself vomit and spent the rest of the day with stomac cramps BUT i now actually know how it tastes. if you wonder, it has a metal-rusty acid taste. not recommended 1/10.
No amount of PPE can protect you from stupid. A number of years ago I was teaching a high schoool chemistry lesson with a bottom year 10 class (15 - 16 year olds). The school has six streamed science classes in each year and this was the bottom one. We were doing experiments with acid, and not trusting the kids I had checked to make sure everyone was wearing safety glasses. One boy, lets call him Moey, was pouring some acid from a beaker and managed to get some on his hands. Being the genius that he was he ignored it. A few moments later his eye became itchy and carefully lifting up his safety glasses he proceeded to stick acid in his own eye. Luckily for him, I knew the class couldn't be trusted and had only provided 0.1M acid, so all he got was a bit of stinging in his eye and five minutes of flushing with the eye shower.
My 8th grade science teacher had an experiment to make sure we followed common sense safety precautions. He'd get us in the lab room to do something, excuse himself to go get something (actually just step out for a bit to observe). On the main table would be a clear glass bowls filled with diluted hydrochloric acid, unlabeled. We were of course thoroughly instructed on all lab safety before we were even allowed to enter the lab, and had to sign a form that we read and understood the rules. One of which is, obviously: do not touch, smell, taste, or otherwise interact with unknown chemicals, ESPECIALLY not clear viscous ones. Anyone who broke the rule in that experiment would pay for it when their nose felt like it was on fire and their eyes were watering and they were promptly ushered out of the lab. My class was thankfully not that dumb, I think a couple of the asshats tried to dare each other to see what it was. He of course didn't tell about it, otherwise people would snitch about it. It weeds out the liabilities. I only learned about it when I was talking to him after graduation.
@@Pindrop22 the one I think they are talking about only does Chem, Chem engineering, Inorganic, and BioChem. It doesn’t really talk about the fields within Organic and Inorganic Chem.
There was a flash fire aboard a US Carrier. The enlisted men all survived, the officers all died. Our lab did forensic testing including flammability testing. Cotton, in enlisted's uniform, starts burning at a lower temperature but burns/ignites slowly. Polyester, officer clothes, has higher ignition temp but melts to skin and burns rapidly.
I got really into some 18th century medicine and decided to use silver nitrate to sterilize an especially bad frostbite wound I had. It sterilized it pretty well and actually completely killed the infected tissue, but some of the silver nitrate spilled into a nearby pitcher of water without me noticing, since I was doing this in my kitchen. The next day, when I was getting ready for work, I went to fill my water bottle from that pitcher, and noticed it was a bit cloudy. I ignored the obvious red flag and ended up drinking some very dilute silver nitrate for a couple hours into my work before I noticed that my throat felt very dry and was starting to hurt. I hope no one else ever goes through this, but I put the pieces together at this point, and frantically googled what happens when silver nitrate is ingested. Needless to say, I completely panicked and ran out of work to buy a gallon jug of water at the supermarket next door to chug, as well as some activated charcoal. I took a few charcoal tablets and drank about half a gallon of water to try to not die. Over the next few days, I learned what it feels like when the surface layer of cells in your esophagus necrose and start peeling away. Luckily, it didn't completely obliterate my digestive system though. I think I learned my lesson, and I will be leaving 18th century medicine in the 18th century from now on.
@@wolfetteplays8894 There’s communities dedicated for being selectively mute. You don’t want to do permanent damage to your body. You can learn how to do that. I went selectively mute for 2 1/2 years. Still talked to people, and found that speech, is in fact, necessary in many scenarios. When someone is in danger, you’re going to want to have speech, or when you really need to communicate something with someone and no other form of communication is going to cut it (which happened a lot for me.) Try to find non-destructive and effective ways around being mute.
Hope you get checked for throat cancer man. Damaging those cells only increase the likelihood of getting cancer there. Glad you made it through that though!
I've found that wearing gloves is probably one of the most hotly debated topics in chemistry labs. In my undergrad, whether you had to wear gloves depended on who was the teaching assistant that day (the TA's all came from different universities). When I worked for Pfizer and in my previous job in an oil and gas chemicals lab, it pretty much came down to personal choice. In my Master's, the health and saftey guy for the whole chemistry department had seen so many fires where people had their gloves melted to their skin that he usually discouraged wearing gloves (unless you knew you were dealing with something nasty). The one thing that was a constant across every lab I've been in? One message always drummed into your head before you even went anywhere near the lab: ALWAYS wash your hands before leaving the lab!
At my university in the undergrad labs they enforced glove use on everyone in the teaching labs, personally I found it rather ill suited when we're working with DCM and ether, those are known to pass through nitrile gloves very easily and wearing gloves traps the vapors and would be far worse than not wearing gloves at all where most of the vapors would just evaporate.
@@Carolus_Tsang you change your disposable gloves the second you spill something on yourself, you don't put them on and carelessly splash solvents everywhere wearing them for hours
My friend took a pill bottle full of mercury to school and passed it out to his classmates, so they had some to play with during class. The school became a super fund site for cleanup
Okay so here’s a fun story from my grad school days. Normally, liquid nitrogen tanks are fitted with pressure relief fittings but this tank (which the lab had since 1980) had both fittings fail at some point in the past. Instead of getting a new tank, the holes were fitted with metal plugs and welded off. Why it didn’t blow before was a real stumper but presumably people were taking nitrogen out of it quick enough to keep it together. At around 3am, when no one was in the lab, the internal tank expanded to press against the external tank so the only place for further expansion was the ends. Well, the bottom of the tank ruptured around a 1200 psi load. I saved a copy of the report from the engineer and have attached it here. This is where things get scary: The cylinder had been standing on the end of a 20’x40’ laboratory on the second floor of the chemistry building. It was on a tile covered 4-6” concrete floor, directly over a reinforced concrete beam. The explosion blew all the tile off the floor in a 5’ radius of the tank, turning the tile into quarter-sized bits of shrapnel that embedded in the walls of the lab. The blast cracked the floor, but due to the presence of the supporting beam, which shattered, the floor held. Since the floor held, the force of the explosion was directed upwards and propelled the cylinder, sans bottom, through the concrete ceiling of the lab and into the maintenance room above. It struck two 3” water mains and drove them and the electrical wiring above into the roof of the building, cracking it. The cylinder came to rest on the third floor of the building, leaving a 20” diameter hole in its wake. The entrance door and wall of the lab were blown out into the hallway. All the remaining walls were 4-8” off their foundations. All the windows, save one that had been left open, were blown out into the courtyard.
Wild blackberries make a good ph indicator. They also make good muffins. So yes, I have tasted the chemicals I’ve worked with I’m not a chemist. I just like making the colors change by alternating baking soda and lemon juice onto a mashed blackberry. Never lose your inner child.
In response to the question about the "special sauce," it's likely Churn, which is a sodium hydroxide solution used to remove carbonized crud off fryers, belted ovens, etc. Where I worked at, you used a spray bottle of it for the floors if there was a massive grease spill earlier in the day and it didn't all get up. You used a splash of it to soak the oven belt overnight, and it made that sucker shiny again.
I looked it up since they said it was called Greasestrip, it's an Ecolab product, and they have the SDS available on file. It is, in fact, a sodium hydroxide solution, at a concentration of 5-10%
This story with the melting bra just reminded me of the girl in my high school (this story isn't chemistry...but also about modesty over protection). We were in Biology class, looking at assorted plant cell samples under microscopes, and preparing our own slides with slivers of white onion which we were to get razor thin and dye so that they would work as slides. The first thing we had to do was wash the onion slices to get rid of any debris that might interfere in the slides later. People were spilling water on the floor while crowding around to wash the onion slices (there was one large basin sink in the room). The floor was standard public building linoleum-type stuff over concrete and was pretty slick already. So...she walks by and slips pretty catastrophically...and while she was falling...rather than try to catch her balance on something...she held her skirt down with both hands and hit the hard floor head-first. I was on the other side of the room at this point looking on in confusion wondering why: 1. No one tried to catch her; and 2. She didn't try to catch herself. She ended up with a concussion and had to miss her volleyball (the semi-finals...they were eliminated), as well as several days of school. This particular image of someone trying to preserve modesty over life has always stuck with me and always will. I'd like to think she learned her lesson from that...but I haven't even seen her since 2005.
6:20 yea humility is definitely a learnt quality in people. I have on many occasions seen PhD students skipping over safety precautions and cutting corners because they "knew what they were doing". My favourite one was when someone decided that she could eyeball a -50 deg C instead of using a thermometer for a Swern oxidation of a particularly unreactive alcohol. For the uninitiated the Swern oxidation is often done at -78 deg C for convenience but this particular piece of literature suggested temperatures over -60 BUT UNDER -45 above which "dangerous runaways were frequently observed". She had apparently "done this before" but someone was taught a valuable lesson in why people need to cool entropy driven reactions that day (glass in face).
Not a chemistry setting at all, but I have a friend who works in a shop, one of the things their work involves is welding. They had just prepped a part for welding using brakleen, and forgot to clean it off the surface before pre heating the part to weld. He ended up hitting the part with the blowtorch, and immediately filling the entire shop with phosgene gas and having to evacuate.
the explosion in beirut was just run of the mill mismanagement and corruption. the warehouse stored all kinds of explosives and fertilizer, and during some welding on a door, a fire broke out. it's likely that this fire ignited fireworks which in turn ignited the ammonium nitrate. the ammonium nitrate was there because it was seized after the ship that transported it broke down and got stuck there, running up $100k in unpaid bills. the customs authority tried to get rid of it, but never got an answer by judges.
Chem Eng here - thinking about the scale-up, when people ask what chem engineers do my answer is, "Chemists make cool things in test tubes, I work out how to make thousands of tonnes of it"
i’m not really sure how i ended up here, since i majored in graphic design before flunking out of college - but the bleach thing reminded me of my own chemical oopsie. it was right after i graduated high school, a friend and i decided to dye our hair. any time i dye my hair, dye ends up on multiple bathroom fixtures. there were black stains on the sink and tub basins that just wouldn’t lift, no matter how much i scrubbed. i clearly needed something stronger - so i grabbed some comet bleach powder we kept under the sink. within minutes i developed a terrible headache, which i almost wrote off until my friend mentioned having one as well. for those not in the know; almost all hair dyes use some ammonium compound (and hydrogen peroxide) to lighten hair. i had just poured the unused hair dye down the sink and chased it with bleach powder! we immediately opened all the windows and set up a couple box fans for good measure. asides from the headaches, we were both fine.
The bra incident reminds me... many years ago, I acquired some scars on my neck (now largely faded), under my shirt collar. Had a little oopsie with some nitric acid, jumped in the shower with my clothes on, and removed my clothes - but by the time I got my shirt off, there was some nasty-looking skin damage. In such situations, absorbent clothing is not your friend. No, I wasn't wearing a lab coat. Goggles, yes, and a good thing too. ... As it turned out, I didn't need to be using full-strength acid anyway. Diluting it a fair bit with water gave much better results for the task at hand, once I got back to it.
One lab I worked in did a lot of organoboron chemistry. A post-doc was doing a vacuum distillation of a mixture of allyl-chloro-boranes, without a lab coat, and the "cow" receiver imploded, spraying the corrosive product across his torso. He threw the shirt off and jumped into the safety shower, and was unharmed. The shirt looked like it had been sliced open with a lightsaber, leaving a jagged and charred diagonal gash from hip to shoulder. It now hangs above the safety shower as a reminder to wear proper PPE. Also, this is how the lab found out the post-doc had nipple rings, which no one really saw coming.
Inadvertently gassed myself with NO2 two days ago. Completely my fault-- respirator filter rated for "acid gases" does not include NO2, which despite being emitted by RFNA is not an "acid gas". This is the importance of due diligence when performing any procedure involving any potentially harmful chemicals. Working with conc. HNO3 for a reaction, one of the byproducts was NO2, and I was cleaning out lingering NO2 fumes from my apparatus by flushing it with water when the fumes dispersed upwards-- and towards my face. The moment I smelled that sweet, somewhat minty and chlorine-esque odor and felt my nose burn was the moment I found out the hard way that 3M does not currently manufacture respirator filters for nitrogen oxides. Luckily it was a very minor exposure, and my symptoms have almost entirely resolved. Decided to go to doctor to be sure, and was cleared with a precautionary 5-day prescription of prednisone. Be careful, everyone!
1:30 i used to work next to a munitions bunker that stored all up rounds (munitions that were loaded with explosives). The bunker was designed to direct an internal blast out into a nearby lake. the safety people would periodically come out and update safety rating of the bunker, and at one point they indicated that the lethal blast radius was overlapping the corner of an office building. the went inside the building and simply taped off that corner, forbidding anyone from keeping a workstation "in the blast radius". There were work stations right next this area. we would often joke that if the ceiling collapses during a blast, only the part of the ceiling above the taped off area would collapse and the rest would be untouched. In reality, we figured if the bunker ever went up then we would either be dead instantly or we'd be more or less fine. There is an immense amount of safety and security though so i was never too worried. Except one time there was a wildfire that burned over the top of the bunker, that was pucker factor 9000. The fire department put out the fire extremely quickly though and it was fine.
At my first job I was told to always have a spare set of clothes in my desk in case my clothes got dissolved. Twice in 40+ years I lost complete sets of clothes to H2SO4. Always know where the safety showers are and don't be shy. It's better to walk to you office soaking wet and naked than suffer bad (or worse) burns.
1:08 Ah, chemical explosions in factories. First it was fertilizer (ammonia), now it’s soap. 1:47 I’ve seen ants dissolve in HCl, I wonder what a dissolving lab mouse looks like.
Re UV ozone lamps: we had/have one in the old country, and the usual procedure was to decontaminate a room if someone was sick in it with something nasty / the room had mould. you would close the door, have the lead running outside the room so you could switch the lamp off without entering the ozone rich room. Everybody would leave the house for like a few hours, then it would be ventilated, but still was a mighty spicy experience. Killed mould like a charm though.
Not exactly lab stuff but may be cool: I did the painting of large industrial machines at my last job. Nobody there was professionally trained to handle this kind of painting. Machines and parts were cleaned with liters of solvents, like 50kg paint with solvent were used every session. In this room some parts were grounded, but most of the parts had a thick coating of hundreds of layers of paint on them, so the grounding was rather useless, floor was a truck tarp which isn't that anti-static either, paint was mixed with an cordless drill, paint storage room besides the painting room was always filled with way over a metric ton of paints, hardeners and solvents. Hanging parts were clicking while spraying them as the static jumped through the thick paint on the hooks they were hung on. Machine which was in the middle of the room would give you a real good electric shock if you came too close while spraying. After my first few sessions as an 2nd year accprentice, I got a real good shock so I made a grounding wire to attach to the machine to avoid being shocked again. Nobody except me used it. One day I was painting some beams hanging on the crane and a spark of like 5cm jumped from the beam to the paint gun in the middle of the spray mist. It was at this time I realized that this was a huge fire and explosion hazard so I also grounded every beam before lifting it into the spray room. Did the job another 3 years after apprenticeship, then I quit. Luckily nobody was ever hurt. A year after I quit, painting booth was closed due to major safety concerns from audit of a big customer. This sounds like the 70s or in a 3rd world country? No, Germany 2014-2021, a company with around 40 employees.
14:44 Huh, hearing about this makes me realise something that happened to me back in January 2021 The restrictions were starting to lighten, and for New Year's, our family decided to go to a famous church that was pretty far from where we live. I rode into my cousin-in-law's car with my Mom, and they were all wearing that "AiR pUriFiEr iOnIsIng aNtI-cOvId nEckLaCe" that they bought from Shopee, and I was the only one who wasn't wearing one bc I didn't believe in that stuff. I felt so uncomfortable during that car ride, and I couldn't breathe properly. I could only feel relief when the windows were rolled down on my side. However, I couldn't have it down the whole time because ✨COVID✨, also car smoke. I thought it was just my asthma acting up at first, since ya boi has pretty weak lungs. Then my cousin-in-law apologised for the lack of airflow because their A/C was broken. I really thought it was either of those two things, until today. Today, I learnt that I was probably huffing Ozone in that car ride because of a scam product. And because I had weaker lungs than the rest of the gang, I was the only one who felt like s🅱️it.
No chance those necklaces were producing any ozone, you need a HV supply to do that. If they're the type of necklaces I'm thinking of though, the dark gray stone looking ones, there is a VERY high chance that they are radioactive and are slowly shedding thorium dioxide dust all over the place. Tell them to stop wearing them immediately.
@@demoniack81 My cousin had these doughnut-looking ones, and my Mom has this diamond-shaped one. I hope my Mom isn't wearing the radioactive kind 💀 But anyway, yeah my Mom stopped wearing hers. She no longer felt the need to bc she's ✨vaccinated✨. Now that's a wise choice. Rely on something backed by science instead of a scam product.
Both of the previous stories I shared here about my nitric acid accidents as a teenager, I acquired the nitric acid by contacting a lab that was going out of business, they made chemicals to calibrate machines and the guy who ran it died then his wife inherited it. It was full of glassware and chemicals, I found them by a Craigslist ad that was selling a separatory funnel. Through texting I told her I was interested in a bunch of glassware and she said I could just come and walk through and pick what I want. I (16 years old) showed up and spent about $600 on a bunch of glassware that was enough to stock an entire highschool chemistry lab without question, then I started asking for chemicals out of the cabinets and she seemed a bit reluctant at first but ended up selling me anything I picked out, (92% fuming red nitric acid, concentrated sulfuric acid, multiple huge 1l bottles of ethanol, anhydrous ammonia and a bunch of other shit I picked out randomly because she was taking whatever offer I threw at her) I ended up spending about $1200 by the end of it and I loaded it all into my first car, a shitty two seater 2008 350z that was not built to carry chemicals or glassware at all 😂. The nitric acid was in a styrofoam protective casing and I buckled it into my passenger seat to transport it to my house. I wasn't a very good driver either.
The phosgene one reminds me of a university laboratory I used to work in; they were proudly claiming they were "chemical process engineers" and didn't have to worry about the subtleties of chemistry. One of the subtleties was, apparently, reading the MSDS, which, combined with the fact that the person responsible for laboratory safety generally reacted to serious accidents by saying "I don't want to hear about this" and going home, caused a number of near-death experiences, as well as the purchase of chemicals no sane person would normally stock. One of them was about 20 g of dibenzochrysene. Luckily, before the bottle was even opened, someone realized how dangerous it was, and left it in a fume hood in a small corner laboratory. Nobody ever used that fume hood, which was empty except for the bottle right in the middle of it. Nobody, in the near two years I was there, ever used that laboratory. This happened long before my time, and nobody was even able to tell me even what that polynuclear abomination had been bought for in the first place. I am, incidentally, a chemical process engineer myself, I just happen to be a tad less suicidal than the general population of that particular university.
XD so your saying there some extreamly radio active voltile item just sitting in a fumehood in a now abondoned lab is a wating nuclear time bomb of death thats just LEFT there.... dang now i want to ducktape a giger counter to a RV and strap a go pro and stream it to see if the things become a diastor or not. *mechanical tracked RV btw.
@@lechking941 Well, no, dibenzochrysene is just an extremely potent cancer agent. You can probably buy isotope-traced versions, but this was just the "normal" version.
For the cleaning solution story, most American restaurants order cleaning supplies from Ecolab, I've seen both the Walk n Wash and Grease Strip in previous jobs at restaurants. The SDS for Grease Strip says it's 5-10% concentrated NaOH. Makes sense why the guy's knees got torn up. A lot of cleaning chemicals use similar chemistry to "regular" chemicals, like H2SO4 or HCl. Usually with some inhibitors or some such to limit harm, but of course it can't be completely avoided with half an hour of contact.
I imagine the "Special Sauce" for dealing with Grease and oils for the kitchen cleaner guy story is probably some kind of strong peroxide like you get in oven cleaners.
We had 'floor shock' degreaser concentrate that had some phosphoric acid in it when I worked in a kitchen. Probably wouldn't hurt you if diluted, but straight..? Never tested that
@@That_Chemist I meant to say a strong/concentrated Hydroxide LOL I'm an idiot when I wake up :D Though I suppose you could use a concentrated peroxide on grease and oils but I imagine that wouldn't be a great idea.
Some oven cleaners contain HF... Jeri Ellsworth fabricated some transistors using over cleaner in place of a HF bath, see "Cooking with Jeri" on UA-cam.
Rather simple story but that was the first (and last) time I tasted a “lab” chemical. I’ve been getting into home chemistry the past year, and a few months into it I figured that I could experiment with gases through some plastic tubes I had. As a first attempt I tried making some carbonated water by NaHCO3 + acid. I don’t remember my exact thought process, but I somehow decided that using hydrochloric acid, heating the solution and passing the tube through a cold grad cylinder was the way to go. So that’s what I did, ignoring the fact that HCl is also dissolved in the water, which is then released by heat and redissolved in the cylinder. I don’t really believe I could’ve harmed myself at such concentration even if I drank the whole cylinder, but I was pretty shocked at how sour my carbonated water had become..
Gawd. Those ionizers... Lived with an old woman (now surprisingly in failing health) a few years ago who ignored my warnings about 03 after figuring out what this odd device was that showed up one day. Her "nutritionist" friend said it was good for her...... My room was far enough removed I didn't get much exposure as long as I stayed there, but I eventually got tired of the entire place smelling like, well, some say it smells like bleach, but possibly due to other smells in the apartment from essential oil lamps and her animals, it smelled like......I'll call it "male emissions." And now that's what you'll think of every time you smell ozone. You're welcome. I moved out after sabotaging the ionizer didn't work. She had an aversion to Amazon, so she must have gotten a replacement from that nutritionist.
@@Islacrusez No this is not generally correct. I don't know enough to tell you all the various ways they could work but there are certainly many that work by being used but then regenerating themselves at the end of a reaction. For example sulfuric acid catalyzes the production of diethyl ether from ethanol - the sulfuric acid ends up protonating one ethanol, the protonated ethanol reacts with an unprotonated one forming diethyl ether and regenerating the sulfuric acid back (I omitted hydronium ions and as far as I know the exact mechanism is debated but either way the sulfuric plays an active role and gets regenerated)
The first lab I worked at had this dessicator, with a big fat skull and crossbones sticker on it, which contained dozens of highly toxic substances, most notably of which being a fairly large vial of ricin. Turns out it has more uses than just poison, but honestly I was afraid just to breath the air surrounding that box of death.
If I've learned anything from my very limited home chemistry, it's that I'm glad I always took set up safety seriously. There's so much you don't know, and you dodge potentially hazardous mistakes by being set up in a good area, wearing proper PPE, and keeping your head on your shoulders. What I'm saying is, doing home chemistry like the guy claiming he was a great synthetic chemist should engender the opposite attitude. You should have an idea of just how little you know and how dangerous things can be. How you end up thinking you're some chemistry hotshot by doing experiments at home is baffling.
In the past I used to work at swimming pools. Once a year, usually around Christmas, the pool shuts down for a few weeks so we can drain it and scrub it. The first thing we'd do after the pool was drained, was to dump 2 ~208L (55 gallons) drums of HCl. Afterwards we'd rinse off the pool with a hose, and then dump many bottles of bleach. We'd hop down into the pool, and scrub using sponges, scrub brushes, whatever else. On our hands and knees, wearing sandals, or barefoot, only some had gloves. There wasn't enough rubber boots for everyone either, and no one had a mask of some kind. We would spend a solid 6-8hrs cleaning and scrubbing. But because it was an indoor pool, there was quite a bit of fumes from the HCl and the bleach. I'd get headaches or be a bit dizzy or nauseous at times, so I'd go outside to breathe some fresh air for 5-10min. I ended up with a few mild acid burns on hands that were fine after a couple of days. But then my left foot (more specifically my big toe and the inner part) were burned quite a bit more. For the next couple of months the skin was bright red, then dark red, then light red, and even healed with no last damage. Though my foot felt like it was constantly too hot or a burning feeling and that lasted for almost a year, even after the redness faded. It's been a few years since, and everything turned out okay for me in the end. However to this day whenever I smell bleach, I feel quite sick and sometimes violently gag. Though that only lasts for a few seconds
this seems pretty tame compared to a lot of the stories, during one of my undergraduate labs we were running a soxhlet extraction on aspirin using ethanol to extract the acetyl salicylic acid, during the extraction i started to get quite light headed, i didnt think anything of it at first but when i turned around to see plumes of ethanol coming out of the top of a labmates condenser. i dont really know how they managed that but our proffessor wasnt too impressed and quickly turned their heating mantle off.
its a lot more common than you think, in ochem we had plenty of bio majors that never cared for chemistry and despite passing various classes before hand were never explicitly shown how to handle distillations or reflux, tons of students had either their condenser full of the reflux reagents or strongly smelling steam coming from the top, my RBF had a crack where it met with the condenser and i could smell the fumes directly hitting my face but i figured it was just a quick reflux and i was fine, as it turns out we did this for over an hour and i had to keep fiddling with the broken variac for the heating mantle or else it would get too hot or too cold
The phosgene story reminded me of a horror story I heard about while I was going through trade school. And I promise you this is going to be a crazy one. So during my A/C certification classes our instructor would tell us that automotive technicians are chemists of a different breed and not entirely for all good reasons. Back in the day when human safety was arguably a joke in the automotive industry and car A/C systems had R-12 refrigerant (dichlorodifluoromethane or CCl2F2 or some times we call it CFC), If a car had an A/C leak the way to check where the leak was coming from was to take a torch (the tool had a specific name I cant remember it but it was basically a torch with a glass cage) and when R-12 came in contact with the flame it would change colors (cool right?). Well unaware to technicians when you burn R-12 it would produce phosgene gas and if you weren't careful you'd get a big lung full of this stuff. As you can imagine yes people died because of this. Now the horror story. My instructor was telling us about how there was a car with an R-12 A/C leak and was somehow making its way through the engine, getting burned and sent out the exhaust pipe where ever this car drove. Unfortunately as the car was being brought into his shop and pumping this gas out, it ended up killing the tech who was working on the car and 2 others who were working behind the car. Cars these days now use R-134a which is tetrafluoroethane (CH2FCF3) or R-1234yf which is 2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene which is a hydrofluoroolefin (CH₂=CFCF₃). And the best part is we no longer burn things to find leaks of any sort. Thank God technology has come a long way
Fun fact in you own a newer BMW the refrigerant used in some of their cars is R-744 or more commonly known as CO2. And yes BMW does charge extremely expensive rates for CO2
I used to work in a factory making rock anchors and related products for the mines. The glue cartridges had benzoyl peroxide paste in it. We would get it in 55-gallon cardboard drums with plastic liners. I never liked working with it, I've heard horror stories about high-test peroxide.
The "parents were more well educated" stuff is probably a veeery specific thing based on middle class parents in the united states Today parents (and kids!) are in general more educated and safety info is way easier to come by. It is easy to find a video on UA-cam about why you should NOT be careless around making lightning patterns on wood with high voltage or to Google the hazards of a chemical Anyway, love your videos. I'm not even educated in chemistry and the details often fly over my head, but through them I've found a deep and fearful respect for chemistry.
@@That_Chemist You also have a whole other culture back then, We protect (for good reason) our kids from unnecessary hazards, While having the ability to play with X-rays as a kid in the 50s were cool, It's also an unnecessary risk for your childs health. That being said everything can be taken to an extreme; Including child safety.
Yeah, like the moms that insists on only using organic chemicals because organic is good & from nature... I want to scream everytime I hear that!! My mom thought elements had expiration dates ☹️ As for me, I learned most of what I knew from library sale books from the 50'-70's. When I built my tec uv laser from the design in the back of scientific American my teachers and parents though I was talking about star wars the movie or something and were just humoring me not believing I could be doing something, anything, *dangerous* ... I was a big fan of TAB books back then, make your own stun gun and things like that....(76'-80' my tween years) , nope that banging noise and purple gas from the sewer wasn't IN3, nope. I was a good boy.... Really makes me wonder what my kids haven't told me yet🤔 Would I even comprehend if they did? My grandmother showed me a report that she got an A on from her highschool Civics class, in the late 20s early 30's, I didn't tell her but it looked like 1st grade work to me, but hey , that was before Susan B. or even the widespread belief in education for women. . I wasn't exposed to linear algebra in school, can you say dot product? Been teaching myself to try and keep up. It's like 4 extra grades were crammed in with new stuff misleading one to think it's a smarter generation and somehow people still graduate not knowing how to read a ruler, clock, or cash a check etc ...
Former hotel worker here. We use Ozone generators on particularly aeromatic rooms. Set the timer for 30m-1h, turn it on and lock down the room. Mitigation for bed bugs is even more fun: Tent the room off and raise the temp up to 170f. Roast for 12 hours.
In 2019 I went to middle school on the open house day. My old chemistry teacher there introduced me to an interested young chemistry fanatic, who wanted to visit this school. The teacher prepared the experiment in which he threw sodium into water and watched it burn. I then asked him: „What’s that haze coming off of it?“ „Good question.“, he said: „The haze is steam.“ Next time he prepared the experiment: „What’s that haze coming off of it?“ „It’s not haze, it’s Hydrogen.“ The boy next to me and I looked at each other in complete confusion. I then told that same boy, he should not go to this school, because with this teacher his talent will be ruined. I got the bad luck of suffering from the time with him. There are many, many more bad stories with this teacher. I am glad, I overcame the bad grades from him, but my then dream of becoming a chemist might never return. He followed my advice not to go to that school. Now he even invented a new sythetic for pharmacy, don’t know anything else about it tho. May he stay as innovative as he already is and let himself not constrain in his abilities
My chemistry teacher told me a story similar to the bra one. When he was a student (which was during communism) his university organized a trip to a chemical plant. One of the sections they were visiting was where they were making aniline from nitrobenzene, by reducing it with iron fillings and HCl. A girl wearing some polyester tights accidentally leaned on a PVC pipe. Yea, you guessed it, it was the HCl delivering pipe and it ruptured under her weight. The acid splashed allover her legs, turning her tights into fishnet. Luckily, they had showers nearby and the acid wasn't concentrated, all she got was a chemical rash that lasted a few days. PS I so want to go to New Delhi!
Interesting to see your comments re phosgene. During my PhD I used phosgene constantly, and would liquify it to add to reaction mixes via an ice-jacketed addition funnel. The source of our phosgene was via a cylinder that was closed off with a square nut. To crack open the cylinder required two people, one to hold the cylinder and one to open the valve with a huge adjustable spanner. Anyhoo, some junior PhD candidates were setting up to rune a phosgene reaction in the overnight lab, so I am helping them. We condensed around 20-30ml of liquid phosgene and it was placed into the ice jacketed dropping funnel. The junior guys set up their run and I was doing a final check. I noticed the ice back around the reaction flask was melting really fast, so looked for the cause. It turns out the junior had accidentally left the heater on the hot plate/stirrer turned on full. I pointed that out to him, so he loosened the clamp holding the reaction flask and lifted it out off the melting ice bath. As he went to move out the ice bath of the (very) hot hotplate, his lab coat sleeve caught on the stopcock of the liquid phosgene filled additional funnel and pulled it out. The liquid phosgene (boiling point 8.3degC) deposited itself onto the now hot hotplate and instantly vaporised. Despite being in a fine hood, the phosgene flashed off and sprayed the junior and a second junior standing next to him. The two juniors then legged it out of the lab and sped down the corridor to the door to exit the building, throwing off cloths as they ran. In the meantime, I stayed in the lab and (mistakenly) opened the windows of the lab to get rid go the now gaseous phosgene, whilst holding my breath. Windows open, I exited the lab and stood by the door to prevent anyone entering. Big mistake as the air in the building was at a lower pressure than outside, so the phosgene was now being blown out of the lab into the corridor through the gap around the door. As it was after hours, I thought this was the best course of action rather than sounding the alarm to evacuate the building. Big mistake. The Head of School came by and stopped to chat with me with phosgene streaming through the door. Luckily he was standing away from the stream (phosgene has an unusually pleasant odour than one would thing from its structure). Anyway, the HOS finishes his conversation and walks off. Back come the 2 juniors, now wearing significantly less clothing than they were originally wearing. "Just how toxic is phosgene?" they ask. "why don't you go up to the library and check then if you don't know" I say (this is pre-"Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 came into effect for Universities in the UK). So off they go. 20 min later they are back. "Holy crap" they say, "you can breathe in a lethal dose and show no ill effects for several hours, then drown in your own body fluids" Next morning the juniors rock up to work. One looked really pale. I ask him, "so what's up with you?" the reply was " I was watching News at 10 and coughed. I didn't know whether to call for an ambulance, so I stayed awake till around 5:00am" So several oopsies all around. Still this was an era in what I believe was very Darwinian. Complete your PhD and still alive and/or with all fingers or other appendages, you earn your PhD. Happy(?) days!
During the holidays I work at a public swimming pool as a lifeguard and as part of our job on the evening shift we have to clean the pools and locker rooms. Every so often we use "hypo" to clean the tiles of the pool, which is 20% sodium hypochlorite solution. The PPE provided is gloves and wellington boots... Also we occasionally derust the lockers using a chemical called "Phosclean" which is just 60% phosphoric acid. Same PPE provided. I really worry that most of my relatively uneducated colleagues don't realise just how dangerous these are since we just carry them around in an open top bucket when cleaning. Also if you mix them they become explosive and produce chlorine gas, yet they are stored in the same cupboard (albeit not on the same shelf).
To tie into the ionizing air purifiers, other "negative ion" products are either completely inert like salt lamps, or *extremely carcinogenic* and filled with powder made from thorium compounds
Speaking of ozone, a family friend of mine is a naturopath and chiropractor. He had an ozone generator that he called an air purifier. This was back between 95-2005ish. His daughter was very young around then, and I could always smell the ozone throughout the house whenever I visited.
Eww. I'd run, i loathe the smell of ozone. I've smelled small amounts of it from playing around with high voltage, and it's just a smell i really can't tolerate.
About tasting chemicals, I had that chemistryset when I was about eleven. In it a container Ammonium chloride. I knew it was an ingredient of liquorice. Also the name on the container read 'salmiac' what is also the name of a popular powdered candy at the time. You understand why this eleven year old tasted a spatula full of the stuff every time the set was opened.
My grandfather was an engineer helping with design and startup of chemical plants in Louisiana and built an acetylene plant for a feedstock for some monomers, to eventually become polymers. They also built that plant with tiles to funnel the eventual up and out. It did, in fact explode. No casualties, and my dad remembers him taking home the least damaged tiles to make a covering for their deck.
I discovered bleach + peroxide on accident in my toilet after using a bleach cleaning product and then sterilizing my bidet jets with my 3% peroxide squirt bottle. When I noticed a reaction I got out of there quick because I didn't know if anything horrible was coming off, but after some research all I found in regards to products was oxygen and salt. I performed a couple experiments and it's a pretty lively reaction even with 3%, and fun to watch because you can float the H2O2 on top of the hypo in a cylindrical flask and the reaction will propagate in a wave downward. The thought of a rocket engine based on concentrated hypo and HTP has absolutely crossed my mind, and given the oxygen you can afterburn the exhaust with some more fuel...
Just wanted to comment, I'm a chef and have been around EcoLab GreaseLift for years. That sounds insane. That maintenance guy definitely had existing scrapes on his knees, but even then that's insane. The worst I've had is a round of skin peel off my hands a day after a big clean. From the msds: Benzyl alcohol Momoethanolamine Benzenesulfonic acid, dodecyl, comp with 2 aminoethanol
Keep up the good work cooking food! Good tasting food is one of the best joys in life, and I am sure you bring that joy into the lives of a lot of people :)
1:50 Me too. But I also completed with a mouthful of HCl, with the same mechanism. In both cases the solutions were quite diluted and there were no consequences. In case you are wondering: HCl tastes... acidic? (yeah, no surprise I guess) NaOH tastes like you bite a bar of soap...
Then again, because the grease remover is added only to the floor, it would not affect the food in the kitchen. If anything, fatty foods and liquids that drop on to the food may have reduced edibility to any kitchen pests, discouraging their presence (or the pests do ingest it, making it an effective pesticide).
A postdoc in my lab was attempting a reaction using small amounts of solid bleach (NaOCl x 5 H2O). Despite being told to always keep it - and the reaction - cold, after 10 minutes I could hear a loud *phooomp* and some glass breaking. I was in the office. On the other side of the hallway.... Thankfully noone (with the exception of that glass stopper) got hurt
Hearing these stories, I'm glad my biggest ever accident was spilling about half a liter of DCM on my crotch when doing masters. I must have made a small crack in the glass when putting the full 3L glass winchester in my fumehood and didn't realise that it was leaking. When I wanted to put it back in the solvent cupboard, I noticed that some liquid spilled into my fumehood as I was holding the big bottle against my body. After a good 10 seconds of trying to figure out what was going on, I felt something cold on my lap and realised the situation. I calmly put the bottle down on the bench and asked for help, and one of the PhDs put the bottle in the fumehood, where the bottle cracked clean open and spilled the remaining 2L of DCM through the fumehood opening onto the floor. Needless to say, we evacuated the bay for 10 mins and I went to the bathroom to clean up. I now realise I should have just stripped there and then, but luckily the slight burning sensation was gone in a minute and the thing to remind me is some dye from my belt dissolving and drying up on my pants. In high school, a chem teacher just gave me an old bottle of mercury (II) nitrate, and of course I made mercury thiocyanate out of it to do the pharaoh's serpent experiment (lighting it up grows a long curvy stick like a snake). So anyway I had about 10 half inch balls of the stuff which we lit on the balcony in the dorm and I didn't use any gloves once they were dry (yikes). I also poured some mercury (I) solution on my hands while filming a high school project about mercury precipitates and while mercury (I) chloride can be seen dripping on the side of the test tube. (the video is still up on this channel, but it's a bit amateur, put subtitles on for english). Aside from that I think I only dropped some nickel and bismuth solution on my skin in high school but so far so good.
As a TA (20ish man) in an undergrad bio lab i witnessed a girl splash H2SO4 on her upper body. I helped rip her lab coat and shirt off (trying to keep it off her face so we tore/cut it off) and then basically fought with her to get her bra off. She resisted for a bit till i pointed to the brown spots starting to show up on the fabric then i took it off-she agreed to this. I helped her shower and directed the class to leave the Rm. 100% NOT SEXUAL. More like Ohhh shitt ohh shittt i hope shes ok. Next day i was called in front of the dean and campus security and she accused me of shittt. I was sooooo pissed. Fortunatly we were not alone and the whole rm of students saw how i was acting. If we were alone i would have likely been kicked out of school and maybe legal trouble too
At a certain point you stop caring about the rules, know you did the right thing, do what you can to explain what actually happened, and if you get in trouble for doing the right thing than so be it. What normally ends up happening when people get in trouble for doing the right thing is people realize it and offer a surprising amount of help. Lost your job? There's 5 job offers waiting for you, and GOOD ones too.
Sometimes people just have to learn the hard way in regards to safety. Fortunately for her, she had you to help her learn without having scars as a reminder. A genuine shame she accused you following the incident. Perhaps next time, other individuals will not be so adamant about safety when being aware of her history. That will be an unfortunate day for her skin.
There's a chemical market in Saigon where you can get basically anything, my wife told me there was an article about a cyanide murder where the cyanide was sourced there. The chemicals are transported by motorbike there in unmarked containers. But she told me she wouldn't go there with me to ask for all kinds of stuff because a white guy asking for chemicals there would freak them out :D
0:35 I used to lick leaking fluids from vehicles when I was mechanic.. only the wet ones not the oily ones... this is the quickest way to diagnose a leak source. Usually, there are only 3 options... not including battery acid because that doesn't normally leak 1 condensed water from the air conditioning. 2. screen wash, which contains alcohol and bittrex 3. antifreeze, which is about 20 to 30% ethylene or propylene glycol
I found an article on silver plating in a 50's electronics magazine with instructions for creating a cyanide based plating solution, It then suggested that for safety any excess cyanide should be flushed down the toilet with two flushes!
The degreaser story: the additional ingredient you are talking about is probably concentrated NaOH. I worked at one restaurant which had a "premium" degreaser mix that contained it, and one guy there handled it without gloves. Let's just say he never handled it without gloves again.
10:50 so I looked it up briefly and from the looks of it most grease strips contain a large amount of sodium hydroxide. So no surprise that it would eat through skin like that especially over that much time. Lye is no joke, despite being a household chemical.
4:10 you can still order a lot of stuff online.. just need to know names/ category/ what it's used for. For example Al powder (dye/ coat) or powdered sulfur (used do disinfect beehives) There is a lot more control though, I imagine if you order 10kg you will have police/ anti-terrorists in your home asking some questions, and/ or the order will be canceled. Story from my city: uni chemistry class, acid spill not cleaned properly (teacher wasn't notified). Girl sits on a chair, stands up and there are holes in her jeans. And a fair bit of butt damage too.
When I used to live with my sister in law, she was a neat freak that insisted I use bleach when mopping. Including the laundry room where she kept the dogs overnight that would have piss and shit all over the floor that has now turned into ammonia. If I develop lung problems later in life I know who to blame.
14:13 reminded me of the time my mum wanted to buy an literal ozone generator. We have cats and as all animals do, they produce waste that stinks. Some of her collegues recomended her to buy an ozone generator to get rid of the smell. They told her that it works great and even though it smells a bit like metal at the beginning, you don't notice it after a while. When explained the toxicity of ozone to her she realized that it was a bad idea and also told her collegues about the issue.
Speaking as someone who has both worked in kitchens and done some university-level study in chemical labs! The cleaning solution from the kitchen story is most likely just concentrated NaOH - odourless (so it doesn't taint the food) and easily saponifies grease - possibly with a thickening agent to make it cling to surfaces (for increased time to react). You see similar substances used for hard tops and in industrial dishwashing machines. I can well believe that concentrated NaOH could eat through someone's skin.
Special sauce for kitchen cleaning is usually Grease Stripper Plus, which is basically gelled sodium hydroxide so it sticks to things. Though we also have stuff called carbon off that's basically sulfuric acid...
My mom did a lab using scathol (the compound that gives shit it's wonderful smell) and some got on her hand. So for a few hours her fingers smelled strongly of shit.
I have 2 stories from undergrad. The first one happened to my University's lab safety manager during my 8th semester. He had to boil 6M H2SO4 for some experiment. The beaker he was using had a microcrack, causing it to shatter when the acid started to boil. It got all over his left hand and forearm. I saw his hand after his second or third skin graft and he said he would need a couple more and that his hand would never be the same. He now refuses to let the undergrads handle the super concentrated acids so that this doesn't happen to one of them. The second one happened in my last lab of undergrad. It was for physical chemistry and my professor wanted us to design a fun experiment for our last lab as long as it had something to do with either constant pressure or constant volume calorimetry. My lab partners and I chose to show the reaction behind the baking soda volcano experiment. We had Na2CO3 and 3M HCl (as we couldn't find literature values for acetic acid but ones for HCl). We tested it first in a beaker in the hood to make sure we had the scale correct and to not damage the calorimeter or not have enough to record the reaction. My lab partner (who applied to a Master's program at Yale as a joke and was their top candidate for that program) held the HCl while he dumped in the Na2CO3. Well, the beaker was no where near large enough to contain this reaction. It got all over him and all over the hood. My professor was just staring at us dumbfounded at what just happened. I asked my partner if he was okay and told him he really should wash off. He was okay and just had some minor skin irritation. Thankfully it was only 3M and he was wearing gloves. But we learned the valuable lesson to not let neutralization reactions occur on your skin. And maybe don't hold the beaker you're about to do a reaction in.
Degreaser is a very standard chemical cocktail to have in any commercial kitchen, ESPECIALLY in fast food where deep fryers and grills can potentially leak or spill all kinds of oil and rendered animal fats onto the floor around them. You do NOT want to just let that stuff stay on the floor. For one, it's a massive slip hazard. For two, it's also a food safety hazard, because fats are one of the many favorite foods of multiple foodborne bacteria. The problem is that just plain soap or standard floor mopping solution doesn't have the chooch to cut through that crap. You need something that can chemically break it down and make it more water soluble. That's where degreaser comes in. It cuts through all kinds of fats and oils fast enough to clean it up before it's sat around long enough to be the health & safety hazard it already is. But of course, in order to do so, it has to cut through ALL kinds of fats--including the same fatty acids that make up cell walls. Hence, its ability to dissolve your own flesh if you're careless with it and don't wash it off as soon as it gets on you. It's just a fact of life in the kitchen. If you can come up with something as good as but safer to use, you'll make bank from the entire restaurant & fast food sector. But until then, it's what we have to use to keep commercial kitchens clean. Source: Have worked in fast food.
At my job, we use a chemical we call stripper to loosen up *all* the layers of wax on a floor to get rid of. My manager at the time told me about how a coworker of hers decided to use that stuff while in her socks. Her skin came off along with the socks.
I'm old but not THAT old (early '80s) and I came up with many of the type of books to which you mention. One that comes to mind is "The Boy Electrician" by Alfred Morgan. I think it a dereliction of duty that so many parents neglect teaching their children to use just precautions and care while exploring their native curiosity. As G.K. Chesterton was quoted: "The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder."
Similar experience with degreaser; I work in restaurants and its VERY commonly used. Once I had a personal metal coffee cup with a TON of caked-on coffee rings because I would usually just rinse it out. A manager suggested I use degreaser, so I used some with a scrub pad and it worked like a charm, spent 10 mins or so scrubbing away at it. At this point I started to feel an odd numbness and mentioned it to the manager, who was surprised to find that I wasn't aware degreaser could eat away at your skin and I hadn't been wearing a glove. I was shocked to find out that this stuff isn't sold in grocery stores, but has been in every restaurant I have worked in since, with virtually no training or warnings on it. My hand was vaguely numb for about a week and a half as if I had burned it. On the restaurant note, you would be shocked how many stories I have of people accidentally making mustard gas. I once dated a guy who had walked in on such an incident and when he came home, he said his contacts still burned from it, I was furious that the place he was working didn't take it more seriously, but it was hardly a surprise.
The special sauce was probably lye crystals mixed into a mop bucket. We used to use it in a spray bottle to clean the ovens because it was cheaper and safer than aerosol cleaners, and sodium hydroxide is the main ingredient in oven cleaner anyways. Safer in that it fumes a hell of a lot less, not that it's /safe/.
Floor stripper is nasty stuff. I used to write SDS for a cleaning chemical company, and floor stripper was up there with oven cleaner on the hazard scale. Both are usually concentrated sodium/potassium hydroxide with a glycol ether (butyl cellosolve) and a flammable isopropanol-water mixture as the solvent. People really underestimate cleaning chemicals, especially ones that you dilute down from a concentrate. However, they are designed to be used with a rinse and follow-up treatment (for floors). Fun fact - strong bases react violently with aluminum, corroding it and producing hydrogen gas. We had some reports of ruined doors after stripper was splashed on an aluminum screen door.
That story of the acid and the bra, ouch. Very ouch. Better to get everything off and decontaminate than try to avoid embarrassment and then end up having chemical burns. No yikes award today though? 😔
I used to be an industry kitchen cleaner (now working in a paint factory surounded by other fun chemicals), i always heard stories about people spilling buckets of caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) on themselves (usually whilst inside the extract duct but occasionally when passing the bucket in or out of the duct, also these buckets would be of varying strength as it was mixed from crystal form) and having to strip off and jump in a sink of soap to wash off or have buckets of soap chucked at them. However we used to clean the filters from the extraction hoods in a sink of caustic next to a sink of soap to avoid damaging/discolouring the floor with caustic drips, luckily I've never heard of anyone jumping in the wrong sink. Also i never used to take eye protection too seriously as I wear glasses. That changed after getting an eye full of dirty gritty caustic whilst in a confined spaces about 3 minutes crawling from the exit. Ps we also used to store bags of caustic soda less than a quarter of a meter away from bags of sulfamic acid (both in crystal form) and after seeing what happens when if you mix them they should have been a lot further away from each other.
@@That_Chemist yeah me too as I nearly blinded myself not long after with boiling caustic ( mixing caustic crystals with boiling water ), luckily just ended up with some scabs on my face for a bit.
I checked out the book you mentioned "Electrical experiments for boys", and made the carbon rod furnace. I borrowed an ark welding hood from a neighbor and had a great time learning while melting nickles and turning plain dirt into beads of green glass. That was in the early 60's when chemistry sets had a few real chemicals in them, and most of the kids had a few more brain cells than today's kids.
Can't say I for sure swallowed any compounds I worked with, but after working with acids I consistently had a slightly bitter/sour taste in my mouth which lined up with exactly how I always imagined said acids would taste
I worked in a kitchen where the staff regularly washed the floor with bleach. At some point, someone decided to start adding vinegar to the bleach water, to "help degreasing the floor"... It went on for a while before I found out why there was a strong smell of chlorine in the kitchen on occasion.
Regarding the Pd/C Story, the same thing happend to me. I must have had a really bad day, so I was adding 5 g of dry Pd/C to a 2 liter flask with 500 ml of MeOH, without flushing it with Argon before. And woosh, instant flamethrower out of the neck of the flask. Luckily nothing else caught on fire, but it was a huge mess. Everything was covered with charcoal.
The story about the grease stripper reminds me of my old job at a soda factory. Between products, we'd have to sanitize the carbonation tanks. I looked up one of the chemicals we used for this and the SDS listed 25% hydrogen peroxide, 10% acetic acid, and 6% peroxyacetic acid. That stuff even smelled dangerous, and even when it was diluted for sanitation (about three gallons to about 500 gallons water) it would leave the skin on my arms red and strip all the oil off my skin. I was the only person who wore gloves, apron, and a splash shield handling that stuff, my coworkers always handled it with bare hands. I can never understand that attitude.
work in a kitchen, we've also got grease strip. no idea what it is but it smells STRONGLY acidic. like, "i should step away and not breathe that in" kind of smell. its used for stuff that's got food burned on or just really bad stuck egg. spray it, let it sit (probably don't stand near it) then rinse it off. takes everything off the pan. if it somehow doesn't, try again, and if that doesnt work the pan's garbage. it's crossed my mind a few times like "man we're putting that on the stuff we put food in," but eh, works real good on burned pans that were forgotten in the oven for 8 hours. that was a fun one.
I’m a mortician and I’m order to get licensed in MN you have to graduate from an accredited program. One of our classes was embalming of course, and using formaldehyde, gluteradlehyde, phenol, and several combinations at various concentrations. We have to do lab safety and bloodborn pathogen training beforehand- but we still had two incidents in the semester I took the class. One of my classmates was placing a cannula in the carotid artery and as she started injecting fluid into the cadaver the rubber tubing popped off. She was drenched and got embalming solution in her mouth and soaked through her PPE. She immediately got in the drench shower and luckily we had extra scrubs for her to change into and the med schools clinic literally across the street. She got away with just some chemical burns on the roof of her mouth. Another lab class we were using a chemical called dry wash which is a super intense solvent- we use it as a degreaser and nail polish remover in the prep room. Apparently it dosent play well with some nitrile gloves as myself and a lab partner both got contact chemical burns where the dry wash touched the gloves.
FYI: nitril gloves are usually not that resistant to organic solvents. Acetone for example goes right through them. Usually you can get a list on the sellers page how resistant they are to which solvent/reagent
A friend of mine has an ozone generator. During COVID, after any time that he had anyone over, he would turn it on by plugging it into an outlet near the door with an extension cord and then leave the house for the day, turn it off when he got home, then spend an hour or more working outside or in the garage while waiting for the house to air out. Not sure if it actually helped but he never got COVID
Just remember: The parts that you don't want everybody to see are also the parts you really don't want to be chemically burned.
Chemical burns in those areas would probably be extremely unpleasant. And excruciatingly painful
@@thememe986
Not to mention the physical and emotional scars, and the detail that scarred tts make a massive hindrance in certain aspects.
just imagine what it's like to feel like you need to preserve your modesty at the cost of excruciating pain or death in order to be safe
living every day with that feeling is more painful in the long run than any chemical burn
It’s been recommended that labs have a shower curtain so that people who need to disrobe or shower don’t have to choose between modesty and safety
@@Dino14345 I give myself about a 5% chance of actually using a safety shower in front of anyone unless my arm is actually falling off, or if shit is in my eyes. So that fuckin modesty curtain thing would be ridiculously reassuring
Remember: Even if you have to strip down completely heck-naked to prevent chemical burns, _that's better than having to go to the hospital because of chemical burns_
Emotional boo boos can be easier to heal than medical boo boos
Some momentary emotional distress is always much better than chemical burn, or prolonged contact with something toxic.
Also if you have the shits. İts better to drop a deuce on the lab floor than in your pants.
Just hand them your clean lab coat. Honestly guys.
"My dick is out if you don't want to be disappointed for me, don't look" is a golden line to pull if you need to
Chem class in 11th grade. Our teacher had a phD but lacked almost all teaching skills. One day, he was holding a bottle with some liquid, went around in class, opened it and let a student take a sniff. "It's bromine - just a little toxic haha" Were his following words. Dude definitely sniffed too many chemicals in his career.
Info to add: the teacher giggled as if he just had played an epic prank on someone instead of exposing a student to toxic gas.
Same teacher, same year, new story. He wanted to demonstrate some reaction and explained that there's a chance it might explode. Can't remember which one it was but come one there are only like a few reactions that can explode. So, right in front on the teacher's desk were student's tables and two boys (about 16 yrs old) sitting there - their faces in line of the test tube that was about to be heated. Teacher explained semi-giggling what could happen but it sure won't - in his words. For that reason, there was a retractable pane of glass which was usually down. He pulled it up, explained again what could happen and then... not kidding... pushed it DOWN cause he was sure nothing would happen. The boys paniced and pulled the pane up. Teacher pushed it down. Boys pulled it up again. Felt like sketch that ended with - who would have guessed? - an explosion only caught by the damn pane of glass.
70's chem phd people be different.
@@Shniedelwoodz XD amusing crazt mad doc
Lmao he let them smell like it was edible
@@Shniedelwoodz The 70's were so wack lol
My inorganics prof also opened a bottle of bromine during one of his lectures. for maybe 2s, because he could not bear the stink any longer. 5min later the stink made its way to me and this is why I know how bromine smells.
like a very bad troll fart.
when i was in uni, we were working with chloroacetic acid.
my stupid ass brain, for no apparent reason, after seeing the lab teacher talking about this white salt-like powder and heard chlor-something acet-something thought that we were talking about sodium acetate.
i took a plastic square tray, and weighted the substance (that was indeed chloroacetic acid) i took it back to my place and said to my lab mate that i took the sodium acetate we needed.
he, who has a functioning brain, noticed that i made a mistake and asked me to throw the sodium acetate, and i simply ate the whole content of the plastic tray because sodium acetate has a decent taste and i wanted to impress him with my braveness.
The taste wasn't that bad and at first i thought i actually just ate sodium acetate.
After some minutes my brain had a spark of intelligence, wich is rare, and told me that sodium acetate should be a basic-dissociation-salt but the powder had instead a really acidic taste.
I then realized what just happened and discovered on pubchem that chloroacetic acid is really toxic and actually deadly if enough of it is ingested.
i induced myself vomit and spent the rest of the day with stomac cramps BUT i now actually know how it tastes.
if you wonder, it has a metal-rusty acid taste.
not recommended 1/10.
Good LORD man
HOLY CRAP DUDE
Genuine glad to hear you're apparently okay; that could have easily been a claptastrophre
Rule 0: don't ingest ANYTHING from a lab
@@lesussie2237 That's also Rule 1, Rule 2 and Rule 3.
No amount of PPE can protect you from stupid.
A number of years ago I was teaching a high schoool chemistry lesson with a bottom year 10 class (15 - 16 year olds). The school has six streamed science classes in each year and this was the bottom one.
We were doing experiments with acid, and not trusting the kids I had checked to make sure everyone was wearing safety glasses. One boy, lets call him Moey, was pouring some acid from a beaker and managed to get some on his hands. Being the genius that he was he ignored it.
A few moments later his eye became itchy and carefully lifting up his safety glasses he proceeded to stick acid in his own eye.
Luckily for him, I knew the class couldn't be trusted and had only provided 0.1M acid, so all he got was a bit of stinging in his eye and five minutes of flushing with the eye shower.
Come on, you only learn from your mistakes with 1M acid
@@chrisb9143 😂
My 8th grade science teacher had an experiment to make sure we followed common sense safety precautions. He'd get us in the lab room to do something, excuse himself to go get something (actually just step out for a bit to observe).
On the main table would be a clear glass bowls filled with diluted hydrochloric acid, unlabeled. We were of course thoroughly instructed on all lab safety before we were even allowed to enter the lab, and had to sign a form that we read and understood the rules. One of which is, obviously: do not touch, smell, taste, or otherwise interact with unknown chemicals, ESPECIALLY not clear viscous ones.
Anyone who broke the rule in that experiment would pay for it when their nose felt like it was on fire and their eyes were watering and they were promptly ushered out of the lab. My class was thankfully not that dumb, I think a couple of the asshats tried to dare each other to see what it was. He of course didn't tell about it, otherwise people would snitch about it. It weeds out the liabilities.
I only learned about it when I was talking to him after graduation.
@@chrisb9143My teacher just gave up and decided that we were apparently competent enough for 12M HCl. Good times.
@@chrisb9143
You sicko! 🤣
You should do a tier list on the areas of chemistry you can get a PhD in
He did in a Q&A
@@1brytol thanks!
That would hurt some feelings lol.
@@1brytol is there a link for that?
@@Pindrop22 the one I think they are talking about only does Chem, Chem engineering, Inorganic, and BioChem. It doesn’t really talk about the fields within Organic and Inorganic Chem.
There was a flash fire aboard a US Carrier. The enlisted men all survived, the officers all died. Our lab did forensic testing including flammability testing. Cotton, in enlisted's uniform, starts burning at a lower temperature but burns/ignites slowly. Polyester, officer clothes, has higher ignition temp but melts to skin and burns rapidly.
I wore cotton clothing under my lab coat.
this is also known for welding, always wear cotton, never synthetics!
That's why, if ever I do something with heat, I wear my fire-resistant ACUs that I kept after my time in the Army.
I got really into some 18th century medicine and decided to use silver nitrate to sterilize an especially bad frostbite wound I had. It sterilized it pretty well and actually completely killed the infected tissue, but some of the silver nitrate spilled into a nearby pitcher of water without me noticing, since I was doing this in my kitchen. The next day, when I was getting ready for work, I went to fill my water bottle from that pitcher, and noticed it was a bit cloudy. I ignored the obvious red flag and ended up drinking some very dilute silver nitrate for a couple hours into my work before I noticed that my throat felt very dry and was starting to hurt. I hope no one else ever goes through this, but I put the pieces together at this point, and frantically googled what happens when silver nitrate is ingested. Needless to say, I completely panicked and ran out of work to buy a gallon jug of water at the supermarket next door to chug, as well as some activated charcoal. I took a few charcoal tablets and drank about half a gallon of water to try to not die. Over the next few days, I learned what it feels like when the surface layer of cells in your esophagus necrose and start peeling away. Luckily, it didn't completely obliterate my digestive system though. I think I learned my lesson, and I will be leaving 18th century medicine in the 18th century from now on.
And yes, I'm fully aware of how stupid I am
Reading that makes my throat feel like it's the aluminum in the aluminum-mercury reaction. Like. Fibers just melting off. I am sorry.
Do you know if it can melt your larynx? I feel like making myself mute
@@wolfetteplays8894 There’s communities dedicated for being selectively mute. You don’t want to do permanent damage to your body. You can learn how to do that. I went selectively mute for 2 1/2 years. Still talked to people, and found that speech, is in fact, necessary in many scenarios. When someone is in danger, you’re going to want to have speech, or when you really need to communicate something with someone and no other form of communication is going to cut it (which happened a lot for me.)
Try to find non-destructive and effective ways around being mute.
Hope you get checked for throat cancer man. Damaging those cells only increase the likelihood of getting cancer there. Glad you made it through that though!
I've found that wearing gloves is probably one of the most hotly debated topics in chemistry labs. In my undergrad, whether you had to wear gloves depended on who was the teaching assistant that day (the TA's all came from different universities). When I worked for Pfizer and in my previous job in an oil and gas chemicals lab, it pretty much came down to personal choice. In my Master's, the health and saftey guy for the whole chemistry department had seen so many fires where people had their gloves melted to their skin that he usually discouraged wearing gloves (unless you knew you were dealing with something nasty).
The one thing that was a constant across every lab I've been in? One message always drummed into your head before you even went anywhere near the lab: ALWAYS wash your hands before leaving the lab!
i like to think the glove deal with them melted to the hands is a good one. but ya hand washing for kitches too.
At my university in the undergrad labs they enforced glove use on everyone in the teaching labs, personally I found it rather ill suited when we're working with DCM and ether, those are known to pass through nitrile gloves very easily and wearing gloves traps the vapors and would be far worse than not wearing gloves at all where most of the vapors would just evaporate.
@@Carolus_Tsang ya it seams depending on what ya working with gloves are good bad or not involved.
@@Carolus_Tsang you change your disposable gloves the second you spill something on yourself, you don't put them on and carelessly splash solvents everywhere wearing them for hours
My friend took a pill bottle full of mercury to school and passed it out to his classmates, so they had some to play with during class. The school became a super fund site for cleanup
There are so many questions to this, first one being you were friends with them?💀
@@sullyschwartz2365 Teenagers get ahold of some crazy things.
Okay so here’s a fun story from my grad school days. Normally, liquid nitrogen tanks are fitted with pressure relief fittings but this tank (which the lab had since 1980) had both fittings fail at some point in the past. Instead of getting a new tank, the holes were fitted with metal plugs and welded off.
Why it didn’t blow before was a real stumper but presumably people were taking nitrogen out of it quick enough to keep it together. At around 3am, when no one was in the lab, the internal tank expanded to press against the external tank so the only place for further expansion was the ends. Well, the bottom of the tank ruptured around a 1200 psi load. I saved a copy of the report from the engineer and have attached it here. This is where things get scary:
The cylinder had been standing on the end of a 20’x40’ laboratory on the second floor of the chemistry building. It was on a tile covered 4-6” concrete floor, directly over a reinforced concrete beam. The explosion blew all the tile off the floor in a 5’ radius of the tank, turning the tile into quarter-sized bits of shrapnel that embedded in the walls of the lab. The blast cracked the floor, but due to the presence of the supporting beam, which shattered, the floor held. Since the floor held, the force of the explosion was directed upwards and propelled the cylinder, sans bottom, through the concrete ceiling of the lab and into the maintenance room above. It struck two 3” water mains and drove them and the electrical wiring above into the roof of the building, cracking it. The cylinder came to rest on the third floor of the building, leaving a 20” diameter hole in its wake. The entrance door and wall of the lab were blown out into the hallway. All the remaining walls were 4-8” off their foundations. All the windows, save one that had been left open, were blown out into the courtyard.
Oh my so fortunate it happened while nobody was in the lab... Literal bomb going off...
@@mmmhorsesteaks agreed but thats also quite funny
Sounds like my garage...
Was the building able to be repaired?
@@petevenuti7355 god.
Wild blackberries make a good ph indicator. They also make good muffins. So yes, I have tasted the chemicals I’ve worked with
I’m not a chemist. I just like making the colors change by alternating baking soda and lemon juice onto a mashed blackberry. Never lose your inner child.
Awe yeah
lol now thats safe at home science.
That's a yikes award. Did you know lemon juice contains hydrogen hydroxide? You can die from inhaling that.
@@jorandax9059 so your saying if i make someone drink a swiming pools worth of limon juice i can kill them with it. XD
@@That_Chemist Do you know what compound(s) act as pH indicator(s) in blackberries?
In response to the question about the "special sauce," it's likely Churn, which is a sodium hydroxide solution used to remove carbonized crud off fryers, belted ovens, etc.
Where I worked at, you used a spray bottle of it for the floors if there was a massive grease spill earlier in the day and it didn't all get up. You used a splash of it to soak the oven belt overnight, and it made that sucker shiny again.
I looked it up since they said it was called Greasestrip, it's an Ecolab product, and they have the SDS available on file. It is, in fact, a sodium hydroxide solution, at a concentration of 5-10%
This story with the melting bra just reminded me of the girl in my high school (this story isn't chemistry...but also about modesty over protection). We were in Biology class, looking at assorted plant cell samples under microscopes, and preparing our own slides with slivers of white onion which we were to get razor thin and dye so that they would work as slides. The first thing we had to do was wash the onion slices to get rid of any debris that might interfere in the slides later. People were spilling water on the floor while crowding around to wash the onion slices (there was one large basin sink in the room). The floor was standard public building linoleum-type stuff over concrete and was pretty slick already. So...she walks by and slips pretty catastrophically...and while she was falling...rather than try to catch her balance on something...she held her skirt down with both hands and hit the hard floor head-first. I was on the other side of the room at this point looking on in confusion wondering why: 1. No one tried to catch her; and 2. She didn't try to catch herself. She ended up with a concussion and had to miss her volleyball (the semi-finals...they were eliminated), as well as several days of school. This particular image of someone trying to preserve modesty over life has always stuck with me and always will. I'd like to think she learned her lesson from that...but I haven't even seen her since 2005.
Modesty is optional, survival isn’t
Modesty over life is literally how people become saints dude.
@@wolfetteplays8894 not if you die first
Couldn’t a hand be used to hold down the skirt and break the fall📓?
@@glauberglousger6643 Presumably to some extent, but putting both hands to the ground to catch your fall is still the better choice.
6:20 yea humility is definitely a learnt quality in people. I have on many occasions seen PhD students skipping over safety precautions and cutting corners because they "knew what they were doing". My favourite one was when someone decided that she could eyeball a -50 deg C instead of using a thermometer for a Swern oxidation of a particularly unreactive alcohol. For the uninitiated the Swern oxidation is often done at -78 deg C for convenience but this particular piece of literature suggested temperatures over -60 BUT UNDER -45 above which "dangerous runaways were frequently observed". She had apparently "done this before" but someone was taught a valuable lesson in why people need to cool entropy driven reactions that day (glass in face).
Yiiiiikes!
One way to get around this issue is by dissolving your alcohol SM in DCM first - no weird cold gums form
Not a chemistry setting at all, but I have a friend who works in a shop, one of the things their work involves is welding. They had just prepped a part for welding using brakleen, and forgot to clean it off the surface before pre heating the part to weld. He ended up hitting the part with the blowtorch, and immediately filling the entire shop with phosgene gas and having to evacuate.
"To get blasted like a stormtrooper" made my day. I am still waiting for the confession of the "chemists" working in the port of Beirut...
the explosion in beirut was just run of the mill mismanagement and corruption. the warehouse stored all kinds of explosives and fertilizer, and during some welding on a door, a fire broke out. it's likely that this fire ignited fireworks which in turn ignited the ammonium nitrate. the ammonium nitrate was there because it was seized after the ship that transported it broke down and got stuck there, running up $100k in unpaid bills. the customs authority tried to get rid of it, but never got an answer by judges.
They were welders, not chemists. Welding door in the warehouse. Warehouse containing both confiscated fireworks and A LOT of NH4NO3.
Chem Eng here - thinking about the scale-up, when people ask what chem engineers do my answer is, "Chemists make cool things in test tubes, I work out how to make thousands of tonnes of it"
i’m not really sure how i ended up here, since i majored in graphic design before flunking out of college - but the bleach thing reminded me of my own chemical oopsie.
it was right after i graduated high school, a friend and i decided to dye our hair. any time i dye my hair, dye ends up on multiple bathroom fixtures. there were black stains on the sink and tub basins that just wouldn’t lift, no matter how much i scrubbed. i clearly needed something stronger - so i grabbed some comet bleach powder we kept under the sink. within minutes i developed a terrible headache, which i almost wrote off until my friend mentioned having one as well. for those not in the know; almost all hair dyes use some ammonium compound (and hydrogen peroxide) to lighten hair. i had just poured the unused hair dye down the sink and chased it with bleach powder!
we immediately opened all the windows and set up a couple box fans for good measure. asides from the headaches, we were both fine.
close call and a lucky one at that.
Thats crazy. Close call
Whyyy would you pour the unused hair dye into the sink?! I would have sealed it in a bag or something and threw it in the trash
Bleach is really loose to any acids. What i know is just never use it for anything under any circumstances.
The bra incident reminds me... many years ago, I acquired some scars on my neck (now largely faded), under my shirt collar. Had a little oopsie with some nitric acid, jumped in the shower with my clothes on, and removed my clothes - but by the time I got my shirt off, there was some nasty-looking skin damage.
In such situations, absorbent clothing is not your friend. No, I wasn't wearing a lab coat. Goggles, yes, and a good thing too.
... As it turned out, I didn't need to be using full-strength acid anyway. Diluting it a fair bit with water gave much better results for the task at hand, once I got back to it.
One lab I worked in did a lot of organoboron chemistry. A post-doc was doing a vacuum distillation of a mixture of allyl-chloro-boranes, without a lab coat, and the "cow" receiver imploded, spraying the corrosive product across his torso. He threw the shirt off and jumped into the safety shower, and was unharmed. The shirt looked like it had been sliced open with a lightsaber, leaving a jagged and charred diagonal gash from hip to shoulder. It now hangs above the safety shower as a reminder to wear proper PPE. Also, this is how the lab found out the post-doc had nipple rings, which no one really saw coming.
Inadvertently gassed myself with NO2 two days ago. Completely my fault-- respirator filter rated for "acid gases" does not include NO2, which despite being emitted by RFNA is not an "acid gas". This is the importance of due diligence when performing any procedure involving any potentially harmful chemicals. Working with conc. HNO3 for a reaction, one of the byproducts was NO2, and I was cleaning out lingering NO2 fumes from my apparatus by flushing it with water when the fumes dispersed upwards-- and towards my face. The moment I smelled that sweet, somewhat minty and chlorine-esque odor and felt my nose burn was the moment I found out the hard way that 3M does not currently manufacture respirator filters for nitrogen oxides. Luckily it was a very minor exposure, and my symptoms have almost entirely resolved. Decided to go to doctor to be sure, and was cleared with a precautionary 5-day prescription of prednisone. Be careful, everyone!
Well, at least you can have a 'laugh' about it now
I bet it's a real 'gas'
...I'll see myself out.
@@SharpForceTrauma I wish it was laughing gas. Unfortunately, this was NO2 that I was exposed to and not N2O. Very funny, though :-)
1:30 i used to work next to a munitions bunker that stored all up rounds (munitions that were loaded with explosives). The bunker was designed to direct an internal blast out into a nearby lake. the safety people would periodically come out and update safety rating of the bunker, and at one point they indicated that the lethal blast radius was overlapping the corner of an office building. the went inside the building and simply taped off that corner, forbidding anyone from keeping a workstation "in the blast radius". There were work stations right next this area. we would often joke that if the ceiling collapses during a blast, only the part of the ceiling above the taped off area would collapse and the rest would be untouched. In reality, we figured if the bunker ever went up then we would either be dead instantly or we'd be more or less fine. There is an immense amount of safety and security though so i was never too worried. Except one time there was a wildfire that burned over the top of the bunker, that was pucker factor 9000. The fire department put out the fire extremely quickly though and it was fine.
At my first job I was told to always have a spare set of clothes in my desk in case my clothes got dissolved. Twice in 40+ years I lost complete sets of clothes to H2SO4. Always know where the safety showers are and don't be shy. It's better to walk to you office soaking wet and naked than suffer bad (or worse) burns.
1:08 Ah, chemical explosions in factories. First it was fertilizer (ammonia), now it’s soap.
1:47 I’ve seen ants dissolve in HCl, I wonder what a dissolving lab mouse looks like.
oh that's fucked up
Definitely wouldn't smell nice
"BROTHER MOUNDIUS!!! NO!!!"
"I'm... Sorry, Brother Hills... I cannot... Go any further..."
Re UV ozone lamps: we had/have one in the old country, and the usual procedure was to decontaminate a room if someone was sick in it with something nasty / the room had mould. you would close the door, have the lead running outside the room so you could switch the lamp off without entering the ozone rich room. Everybody would leave the house for like a few hours, then it would be ventilated, but still was a mighty spicy experience. Killed mould like a charm though.
Not exactly lab stuff but may be cool:
I did the painting of large industrial machines at my last job.
Nobody there was professionally trained to handle this kind of painting.
Machines and parts were cleaned with liters of solvents, like 50kg paint with solvent were used every session.
In this room some parts were grounded, but most of the parts had a thick coating of hundreds of layers of paint on them, so the grounding was rather useless, floor was a truck tarp which isn't that anti-static either, paint was mixed with an cordless drill, paint storage room besides the painting room was always filled with way over a metric ton of paints, hardeners and solvents.
Hanging parts were clicking while spraying them as the static jumped through the thick paint on the hooks they were hung on.
Machine which was in the middle of the room would give you a real good electric shock if you came too close while spraying.
After my first few sessions as an 2nd year accprentice, I got a real good shock so I made a grounding wire to attach to the machine to avoid being shocked again. Nobody except me used it.
One day I was painting some beams hanging on the crane and a spark of like 5cm jumped from the beam to the paint gun in the middle of the spray mist.
It was at this time I realized that this was a huge fire and explosion hazard so I also grounded every beam before lifting it into the spray room.
Did the job another 3 years after apprenticeship, then I quit.
Luckily nobody was ever hurt.
A year after I quit, painting booth was closed due to major safety concerns from audit of a big customer.
This sounds like the 70s or in a 3rd world country? No, Germany 2014-2021, a company with around 40 employees.
14:44 Huh, hearing about this makes me realise something that happened to me back in January 2021
The restrictions were starting to lighten, and for New Year's, our family decided to go to a famous church that was pretty far from where we live.
I rode into my cousin-in-law's car with my Mom, and they were all wearing that "AiR pUriFiEr iOnIsIng aNtI-cOvId nEckLaCe" that they bought from Shopee, and I was the only one who wasn't wearing one bc I didn't believe in that stuff.
I felt so uncomfortable during that car ride, and I couldn't breathe properly. I could only feel relief when the windows were rolled down on my side. However, I couldn't have it down the whole time because ✨COVID✨, also car smoke.
I thought it was just my asthma acting up at first, since ya boi has pretty weak lungs. Then my cousin-in-law apologised for the lack of airflow because their A/C was broken.
I really thought it was either of those two things, until today.
Today, I learnt that I was probably huffing Ozone in that car ride because of a scam product.
And because I had weaker lungs than the rest of the gang, I was the only one who felt like s🅱️it.
No chance those necklaces were producing any ozone, you need a HV supply to do that. If they're the type of necklaces I'm thinking of though, the dark gray stone looking ones, there is a VERY high chance that they are radioactive and are slowly shedding thorium dioxide dust all over the place. Tell them to stop wearing them immediately.
@@demoniack81 100%, absolutely disgusting this got through to ignorant consumers.
There are some "air ionizers" that use thorium to ionize the air...
@@demoniack81 My cousin had these doughnut-looking ones, and my Mom has this diamond-shaped one. I hope my Mom isn't wearing the radioactive kind 💀
But anyway, yeah my Mom stopped wearing hers. She no longer felt the need to bc she's ✨vaccinated✨. Now that's a wise choice. Rely on something backed by science instead of a scam product.
Both of the previous stories I shared here about my nitric acid accidents as a teenager, I acquired the nitric acid by contacting a lab that was going out of business, they made chemicals to calibrate machines and the guy who ran it died then his wife inherited it. It was full of glassware and chemicals, I found them by a Craigslist ad that was selling a separatory funnel. Through texting I told her I was interested in a bunch of glassware and she said I could just come and walk through and pick what I want. I (16 years old) showed up and spent about $600 on a bunch of glassware that was enough to stock an entire highschool chemistry lab without question, then I started asking for chemicals out of the cabinets and she seemed a bit reluctant at first but ended up selling me anything I picked out, (92% fuming red nitric acid, concentrated sulfuric acid, multiple huge 1l bottles of ethanol, anhydrous ammonia and a bunch of other shit I picked out randomly because she was taking whatever offer I threw at her) I ended up spending about $1200 by the end of it and I loaded it all into my first car, a shitty two seater 2008 350z that was not built to carry chemicals or glassware at all 😂. The nitric acid was in a styrofoam protective casing and I buckled it into my passenger seat to transport it to my house. I wasn't a very good driver either.
Holy Mary's ballsack you really went all out huh?
FUCK thats a even more yikes award.
92% HNO3 is crazy. Like, even I don’t go anywhere near fuming nitric acid.
@@bunsenn5064 it's crazy I spilled a nitric acid silver solution on my hands and it didn't even burn just turned me purple
@@jasonm7973purple guy?
The phosgene one reminds me of a university laboratory I used to work in; they were proudly claiming they were "chemical process engineers" and didn't have to worry about the subtleties of chemistry. One of the subtleties was, apparently, reading the MSDS, which, combined with the fact that the person responsible for laboratory safety generally reacted to serious accidents by saying "I don't want to hear about this" and going home, caused a number of near-death experiences, as well as the purchase of chemicals no sane person would normally stock. One of them was about 20 g of dibenzochrysene. Luckily, before the bottle was even opened, someone realized how dangerous it was, and left it in a fume hood in a small corner laboratory. Nobody ever used that fume hood, which was empty except for the bottle right in the middle of it. Nobody, in the near two years I was there, ever used that laboratory. This happened long before my time, and nobody was even able to tell me even what that polynuclear abomination had been bought for in the first place.
I am, incidentally, a chemical process engineer myself, I just happen to be a tad less suicidal than the general population of that particular university.
XD so your saying there some extreamly radio active voltile item just sitting in a fumehood in a now abondoned lab is a wating nuclear time bomb of death thats just LEFT there.... dang now i want to ducktape a giger counter to a RV and strap a go pro and stream it to see if the things become a diastor or not. *mechanical tracked RV btw.
@@lechking941 Well, no, dibenzochrysene is just an extremely potent cancer agent. You can probably buy isotope-traced versions, but this was just the "normal" version.
For the cleaning solution story, most American restaurants order cleaning supplies from Ecolab, I've seen both the Walk n Wash and Grease Strip in previous jobs at restaurants. The SDS for Grease Strip says it's 5-10% concentrated NaOH. Makes sense why the guy's knees got torn up. A lot of cleaning chemicals use similar chemistry to "regular" chemicals, like H2SO4 or HCl. Usually with some inhibitors or some such to limit harm, but of course it can't be completely avoided with half an hour of contact.
I imagine the "Special Sauce" for dealing with Grease and oils for the kitchen cleaner guy story is probably some kind of strong peroxide like you get in oven cleaners.
It never even occurred to me that you could use peroxide for something like that
I think it's sodium hydroxide
We had 'floor shock' degreaser concentrate that had some phosphoric acid in it when I worked in a kitchen. Probably wouldn't hurt you if diluted, but straight..? Never tested that
@@That_Chemist I meant to say a strong/concentrated Hydroxide LOL I'm an idiot when I wake up :D
Though I suppose you could use a concentrated peroxide on grease and oils but I imagine that wouldn't be a great idea.
Some oven cleaners contain HF... Jeri Ellsworth fabricated some transistors using over cleaner in place of a HF bath, see "Cooking with Jeri" on UA-cam.
The whole thing with bleach’s reactivity also makes it dangerous to pee on if it’s being used to clean a toilet, right?
Technically, yes, I think so
Chlorine and ammonium make chloramine gases baby
Which is why you flush a few times before you pee into the toilet!
i can confirm oxidane exactly tastes how it smells like
Rather simple story but that was the first (and last) time I tasted a “lab” chemical. I’ve been getting into home chemistry the past year, and a few months into it I figured that I could experiment with gases through some plastic tubes I had. As a first attempt I tried making some carbonated water by NaHCO3 + acid. I don’t remember my exact thought process, but I somehow decided that using hydrochloric acid, heating the solution and passing the tube through a cold grad cylinder was the way to go. So that’s what I did, ignoring the fact that HCl is also dissolved in the water, which is then released by heat and redissolved in the cylinder. I don’t really believe I could’ve harmed myself at such concentration even if I drank the whole cylinder, but I was pretty shocked at how sour my carbonated water had become..
Gawd. Those ionizers... Lived with an old woman (now surprisingly in failing health) a few years ago who ignored my warnings about 03 after figuring out what this odd device was that showed up one day. Her "nutritionist" friend said it was good for her...... My room was far enough removed I didn't get much exposure as long as I stayed there, but I eventually got tired of the entire place smelling like, well, some say it smells like bleach, but possibly due to other smells in the apartment from essential oil lamps and her animals, it smelled like......I'll call it "male emissions."
And now that's what you'll think of every time you smell ozone. You're welcome. I moved out after sabotaging the ionizer didn't work. She had an aversion to Amazon, so she must have gotten a replacement from that nutritionist.
Ty for explaining some of the stuff like the plateum/carbon for us non-chemists who are still fascinated by this stuff.
The metal is palladium, it is somewhat similar to gold and is used in some alloys with gold, it is also used in some catalytic converters
@@Osama-Bon-Jovi-01 how is it similar to gold? Isn't gold famous for not reacting with much. This is a genuine question btw
@@mastermohit if my school-era chemistry serves me right, catalysts only help facilitate the reaction in some way, but do not themselves react.
@@Islacrusez No this is not generally correct. I don't know enough to tell you all the various ways they could work but there are certainly many that work by being used but then regenerating themselves at the end of a reaction. For example sulfuric acid catalyzes the production of diethyl ether from ethanol - the sulfuric acid ends up protonating one ethanol, the protonated ethanol reacts with an unprotonated one forming diethyl ether and regenerating the sulfuric acid back (I omitted hydronium ions and as far as I know the exact mechanism is debated but either way the sulfuric plays an active role and gets regenerated)
@@samuelallanviolin752 huh, neat! Thanks for the extra info
The first lab I worked at had this dessicator, with a big fat skull and crossbones sticker on it, which contained dozens of highly toxic substances, most notably of which being a fairly large vial of ricin. Turns out it has more uses than just poison, but honestly I was afraid just to breath the air surrounding that box of death.
dang
If I've learned anything from my very limited home chemistry, it's that I'm glad I always took set up safety seriously. There's so much you don't know, and you dodge potentially hazardous mistakes by being set up in a good area, wearing proper PPE, and keeping your head on your shoulders.
What I'm saying is, doing home chemistry like the guy claiming he was a great synthetic chemist should engender the opposite attitude. You should have an idea of just how little you know and how dangerous things can be. How you end up thinking you're some chemistry hotshot by doing experiments at home is baffling.
In the past I used to work at swimming pools. Once a year, usually around Christmas, the pool shuts down for a few weeks so we can drain it and scrub it.
The first thing we'd do after the pool was drained, was to dump 2 ~208L (55 gallons) drums of HCl.
Afterwards we'd rinse off the pool with a hose, and then dump many bottles of bleach.
We'd hop down into the pool, and scrub using sponges, scrub brushes, whatever else. On our hands and knees, wearing sandals, or barefoot, only some had gloves. There wasn't enough rubber boots for everyone either, and no one had a mask of some kind.
We would spend a solid 6-8hrs cleaning and scrubbing. But because it was an indoor pool, there was quite a bit of fumes from the HCl and the bleach. I'd get headaches or be a bit dizzy or nauseous at times, so I'd go outside to breathe some fresh air for 5-10min.
I ended up with a few mild acid burns on hands that were fine after a couple of days. But then my left foot (more specifically my big toe and the inner part) were burned quite a bit more. For the next couple of months the skin was bright red, then dark red, then light red, and even healed with no last damage.
Though my foot felt like it was constantly too hot or a burning feeling and that lasted for almost a year, even after the redness faded. It's been a few years since, and everything turned out okay for me in the end. However to this day whenever I smell bleach, I feel quite sick and sometimes violently gag. Though that only lasts for a few seconds
:(((((
this seems pretty tame compared to a lot of the stories, during one of my undergraduate labs we were running a soxhlet extraction on aspirin using ethanol to extract the acetyl salicylic acid, during the extraction i started to get quite light headed, i didnt think anything of it at first but when i turned around to see plumes of ethanol coming out of the top of a labmates condenser. i dont really know how they managed that but our proffessor wasnt too impressed and quickly turned their heating mantle off.
its a lot more common than you think, in ochem we had plenty of bio majors that never cared for chemistry and despite passing various classes before hand were never explicitly shown how to handle distillations or reflux, tons of students had either their condenser full of the reflux reagents or strongly smelling steam coming from the top, my RBF had a crack where it met with the condenser and i could smell the fumes directly hitting my face but i figured it was just a quick reflux and i was fine, as it turns out we did this for over an hour and i had to keep fiddling with the broken variac for the heating mantle or else it would get too hot or too cold
He was smoking alcohol? Goddamn, that sounds innovative
@@wolfetteplays8894 mans was living in the future
The phosgene story reminded me of a horror story I heard about while I was going through trade school. And I promise you this is going to be a crazy one.
So during my A/C certification classes our instructor would tell us that automotive technicians are chemists of a different breed and not entirely for all good reasons.
Back in the day when human safety was arguably a joke in the automotive industry and car A/C systems had R-12 refrigerant (dichlorodifluoromethane or CCl2F2 or some times we call it CFC), If a car had an A/C leak the way to check where the leak was coming from was to take a torch (the tool had a specific name I cant remember it but it was basically a torch with a glass cage) and when R-12 came in contact with the flame it would change colors (cool right?). Well unaware to technicians when you burn R-12 it would produce phosgene gas and if you weren't careful you'd get a big lung full of this stuff. As you can imagine yes people died because of this.
Now the horror story. My instructor was telling us about how there was a car with an R-12 A/C leak and was somehow making its way through the engine, getting burned and sent out the exhaust pipe where ever this car drove. Unfortunately as the car was being brought into his shop and pumping this gas out, it ended up killing the tech who was working on the car and 2 others who were working behind the car.
Cars these days now use R-134a which is tetrafluoroethane (CH2FCF3) or R-1234yf which is 2,3,3,3-Tetrafluoropropene which is a hydrofluoroolefin (CH₂=CFCF₃). And the best part is we no longer burn things to find leaks of any sort. Thank God technology has come a long way
Fun fact in you own a newer BMW the refrigerant used in some of their cars is R-744 or more commonly known as CO2. And yes BMW does charge extremely expensive rates for CO2
I used to work in a factory making rock anchors and related products for the mines. The glue cartridges had benzoyl peroxide paste in it. We would get it in 55-gallon cardboard drums with plastic liners. I never liked working with it, I've heard horror stories about high-test peroxide.
The anti grease stuff is super common I worked in fast food as a teen and I got grill cleaner on my arms and it dissolved my skin on some blotches
Nooooo :(
Holy crap that's horrifying!
The "parents were more well educated" stuff is probably a veeery specific thing based on middle class parents in the united states
Today parents (and kids!) are in general more educated and safety info is way easier to come by. It is easy to find a video on UA-cam about why you should NOT be careless around making lightning patterns on wood with high voltage or to Google the hazards of a chemical
Anyway, love your videos. I'm not even educated in chemistry and the details often fly over my head, but through them I've found a deep and fearful respect for chemistry.
I feel like in many respects people have become more educated, but chemistry seems like the opposite has happened - let’s educate people regardless
@@That_Chemist You also have a whole other culture back then, We protect (for good reason) our kids from unnecessary hazards, While having the ability to play with X-rays as a kid in the 50s were cool, It's also an unnecessary risk for your childs health. That being said everything can be taken to an extreme; Including child safety.
@@That_Chemist We have a lot more information, but who's actually seen it is difficult to gauge
@@BeeTriggerBee *and we live in that safty extream*
Yeah, like the moms that insists on only using organic chemicals because organic is good & from nature... I want to scream everytime I hear that!!
My mom thought elements had expiration dates ☹️
As for me, I learned most of what I knew from library sale books from the 50'-70's. When I built my tec uv laser from the design in the back of scientific American my teachers and parents though I was talking about star wars the movie or something and were just humoring me not believing I could be doing something, anything, *dangerous* ... I was a big fan of TAB books back then, make your own stun gun and things like that....(76'-80' my tween years) , nope that banging noise and purple gas from the sewer wasn't IN3, nope. I was a good boy....
Really makes me wonder what my kids haven't told me yet🤔 Would I even comprehend if they did?
My grandmother showed me a report that she got an A on from her highschool Civics class, in the late 20s early 30's, I didn't tell her but it looked like 1st grade work to me, but hey , that was before Susan B. or even the widespread belief in education for women. . I wasn't exposed to linear algebra in school, can you say dot product? Been teaching myself to try and keep up. It's like 4 extra grades were crammed in with new stuff misleading one to think it's a smarter generation
and somehow people still graduate not knowing how to read a ruler, clock, or cash a check etc ...
You know what would be a good tier list ?
A tar tier list
Former hotel worker here. We use Ozone generators on particularly aeromatic rooms. Set the timer for 30m-1h, turn it on and lock down the room.
Mitigation for bed bugs is even more fun: Tent the room off and raise the temp up to 170f. Roast for 12 hours.
In 2019 I went to middle school on the open house day. My old chemistry teacher there introduced me to an interested young chemistry fanatic, who wanted to visit this school.
The teacher prepared the experiment in which he threw sodium into water and watched it burn. I then asked him: „What’s that haze coming off of it?“
„Good question.“, he said: „The haze is steam.“
Next time he prepared the experiment:
„What’s that haze coming off of it?“
„It’s not haze, it’s Hydrogen.“
The boy next to me and I looked at each other in complete confusion.
I then told that same boy, he should not go to this school, because with this teacher his talent will be ruined. I got the bad luck of suffering from the time with him. There are many, many more bad stories with this teacher. I am glad, I overcame the bad grades from him, but my then dream of becoming a chemist might never return.
He followed my advice not to go to that school. Now he even invented a new sythetic for pharmacy, don’t know anything else about it tho. May he stay as innovative as he already is and let himself not constrain in his abilities
Yeah it's horrible that a bad teacher can wreck a promising student's interest in almost any area of study. First experiences really matter!
My chemistry teacher told me a story similar to the bra one. When he was a student (which was during communism) his university organized a trip to a chemical plant. One of the sections they were visiting was where they were making aniline from nitrobenzene, by reducing it with iron fillings and HCl. A girl wearing some polyester tights accidentally leaned on a PVC pipe. Yea, you guessed it, it was the HCl delivering pipe and it ruptured under her weight. The acid splashed allover her legs, turning her tights into fishnet. Luckily, they had showers nearby and the acid wasn't concentrated, all she got was a chemical rash that lasted a few days.
PS I so want to go to New Delhi!
Interesting to see your comments re phosgene. During my PhD I used phosgene constantly, and would liquify it to add to reaction mixes via an ice-jacketed addition funnel. The source of our phosgene was via a cylinder that was closed off with a square nut. To crack open the cylinder required two people, one to hold the cylinder and one to open the valve with a huge adjustable spanner.
Anyhoo, some junior PhD candidates were setting up to rune a phosgene reaction in the overnight lab, so I am helping them. We condensed around 20-30ml of liquid phosgene and it was placed into the ice jacketed dropping funnel. The junior guys set up their run and I was doing a final check. I noticed the ice back around the reaction flask was melting really fast, so looked for the cause. It turns out the junior had accidentally left the heater on the hot plate/stirrer turned on full. I pointed that out to him, so he loosened the clamp holding the reaction flask and lifted it out off the melting ice bath. As he went to move out the ice bath of the (very) hot hotplate, his lab coat sleeve caught on the stopcock of the liquid phosgene filled additional funnel and pulled it out. The liquid phosgene (boiling point 8.3degC) deposited itself onto the now hot hotplate and instantly vaporised. Despite being in a fine hood, the phosgene flashed off and sprayed the junior and a second junior standing next to him.
The two juniors then legged it out of the lab and sped down the corridor to the door to exit the building, throwing off cloths as they ran. In the meantime, I stayed in the lab and (mistakenly) opened the windows of the lab to get rid go the now gaseous phosgene, whilst holding my breath. Windows open, I exited the lab and stood by the door to prevent anyone entering. Big mistake as the air in the building was at a lower pressure than outside, so the phosgene was now being blown out of the lab into the corridor through the gap around the door. As it was after hours, I thought this was the best course of action rather than sounding the alarm to evacuate the building. Big mistake. The Head of School came by and stopped to chat with me with phosgene streaming through the door. Luckily he was standing away from the stream (phosgene has an unusually pleasant odour than one would thing from its structure). Anyway, the HOS finishes his conversation and walks off.
Back come the 2 juniors, now wearing significantly less clothing than they were originally wearing. "Just how toxic is phosgene?" they ask. "why don't you go up to the library and check then if you don't know" I say (this is pre-"Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 came into effect for Universities in the UK). So off they go. 20 min later they are back. "Holy crap" they say, "you can breathe in a lethal dose and show no ill effects for several hours, then drown in your own body fluids"
Next morning the juniors rock up to work. One looked really pale. I ask him, "so what's up with you?" the reply was " I was watching News at 10 and coughed. I didn't know whether to call for an ambulance, so I stayed awake till around 5:00am"
So several oopsies all around. Still this was an era in what I believe was very Darwinian. Complete your PhD and still alive and/or with all fingers or other appendages, you earn your PhD.
Happy(?) days!
That is absolutely terrifying
During the holidays I work at a public swimming pool as a lifeguard and as part of our job on the evening shift we have to clean the pools and locker rooms. Every so often we use "hypo" to clean the tiles of the pool, which is 20% sodium hypochlorite solution. The PPE provided is gloves and wellington boots...
Also we occasionally derust the lockers using a chemical called "Phosclean" which is just 60% phosphoric acid. Same PPE provided. I really worry that most of my relatively uneducated colleagues don't realise just how dangerous these are since we just carry them around in an open top bucket when cleaning. Also if you mix them they become explosive and produce chlorine gas, yet they are stored in the same cupboard (albeit not on the same shelf).
omg maybe tell your coworkers about the chlorine gas?! That's an accident just waiting to happen
To tie into the ionizing air purifiers, other "negative ion" products are either completely inert like salt lamps, or *extremely carcinogenic* and filled with powder made from thorium compounds
Speaking of ozone, a family friend of mine is a naturopath and chiropractor. He had an ozone generator that he called an air purifier. This was back between 95-2005ish. His daughter was very young around then, and I could always smell the ozone throughout the house whenever I visited.
Eww. I'd run, i loathe the smell of ozone. I've smelled small amounts of it from playing around with high voltage, and it's just a smell i really can't tolerate.
About tasting chemicals, I had that chemistryset when I was about eleven. In it a container Ammonium chloride. I knew it was an ingredient of liquorice. Also the name on the container read 'salmiac' what is also the name of a popular powdered candy at the time.
You understand why this eleven year old tasted a spatula full of the stuff every time the set was opened.
My grandfather was an engineer helping with design and startup of chemical plants in Louisiana and built an acetylene plant for a feedstock for some monomers, to eventually become polymers.
They also built that plant with tiles to funnel the eventual up and out. It did, in fact explode. No casualties, and my dad remembers him taking home the least damaged tiles to make a covering for their deck.
I discovered bleach + peroxide on accident in my toilet after using a bleach cleaning product and then sterilizing my bidet jets with my 3% peroxide squirt bottle. When I noticed a reaction I got out of there quick because I didn't know if anything horrible was coming off, but after some research all I found in regards to products was oxygen and salt. I performed a couple experiments and it's a pretty lively reaction even with 3%, and fun to watch because you can float the H2O2 on top of the hypo in a cylindrical flask and the reaction will propagate in a wave downward. The thought of a rocket engine based on concentrated hypo and HTP has absolutely crossed my mind, and given the oxygen you can afterburn the exhaust with some more fuel...
Just wanted to comment, I'm a chef and have been around EcoLab GreaseLift for years. That sounds insane. That maintenance guy definitely had existing scrapes on his knees, but even then that's insane. The worst I've had is a round of skin peel off my hands a day after a big clean. From the msds:
Benzyl alcohol
Momoethanolamine
Benzenesulfonic acid, dodecyl, comp with 2 aminoethanol
Keep up the good work cooking food! Good tasting food is one of the best joys in life, and I am sure you bring that joy into the lives of a lot of people :)
1:50 Me too. But I also completed with a mouthful of HCl, with the same mechanism. In both cases the solutions were quite diluted and there were no consequences.
In case you are wondering: HCl tastes... acidic? (yeah, no surprise I guess) NaOH tastes like you bite a bar of soap...
thats your tongue being turned into soap
Then again, because the grease remover is added only to the floor, it would not affect the food in the kitchen.
If anything, fatty foods and liquids that drop on to the food may have reduced edibility to any kitchen pests, discouraging their presence (or the pests do ingest it, making it an effective pesticide).
A postdoc in my lab was attempting a reaction using small amounts of solid bleach (NaOCl x 5 H2O). Despite being told to always keep it - and the reaction - cold, after 10 minutes I could hear a loud *phooomp* and some glass breaking. I was in the office. On the other side of the hallway.... Thankfully noone (with the exception of that glass stopper) got hurt
Hearing these stories, I'm glad my biggest ever accident was spilling about half a liter of DCM on my crotch when doing masters. I must have made a small crack in the glass when putting the full 3L glass winchester in my fumehood and didn't realise that it was leaking. When I wanted to put it back in the solvent cupboard, I noticed that some liquid spilled into my fumehood as I was holding the big bottle against my body. After a good 10 seconds of trying to figure out what was going on, I felt something cold on my lap and realised the situation. I calmly put the bottle down on the bench and asked for help, and one of the PhDs put the bottle in the fumehood, where the bottle cracked clean open and spilled the remaining 2L of DCM through the fumehood opening onto the floor. Needless to say, we evacuated the bay for 10 mins and I went to the bathroom to clean up. I now realise I should have just stripped there and then, but luckily the slight burning sensation was gone in a minute and the thing to remind me is some dye from my belt dissolving and drying up on my pants.
In high school, a chem teacher just gave me an old bottle of mercury (II) nitrate, and of course I made mercury thiocyanate out of it to do the pharaoh's serpent experiment (lighting it up grows a long curvy stick like a snake). So anyway I had about 10 half inch balls of the stuff which we lit on the balcony in the dorm and I didn't use any gloves once they were dry (yikes).
I also poured some mercury (I) solution on my hands while filming a high school project about mercury precipitates and while mercury (I) chloride can be seen dripping on the side of the test tube. (the video is still up on this channel, but it's a bit amateur, put subtitles on for english). Aside from that I think I only dropped some nickel and bismuth solution on my skin in high school but so far so good.
gez. now i got to see the stupid.
Eating Mercaptoethanol, my god, no bueno, I hope his DNA is okay
It was probably fine in the trace amounts he would have consumed, just thoroughly grossed out. ;)
As a TA (20ish man) in an undergrad bio lab i witnessed a girl splash H2SO4 on her upper body. I helped rip her lab coat and shirt off (trying to keep it off her face so we tore/cut it off) and then basically fought with her to get her bra off. She resisted for a bit till i pointed to the brown spots starting to show up on the fabric then i took it off-she agreed to this. I helped her shower and directed the class to leave the Rm. 100% NOT SEXUAL. More like Ohhh shitt ohh shittt i hope shes ok. Next day i was called in front of the dean and campus security and she accused me of shittt. I was sooooo pissed. Fortunatly we were not alone and the whole rm of students saw how i was acting. If we were alone i would have likely been kicked out of school and maybe legal trouble too
This is like in the incredibles when Mr. Incredible gets sued for saving a guy who jumped off a building
At a certain point you stop caring about the rules, know you did the right thing, do what you can to explain what actually happened, and if you get in trouble for doing the right thing than so be it. What normally ends up happening when people get in trouble for doing the right thing is people realize it and offer a surprising amount of help. Lost your job? There's 5 job offers waiting for you, and GOOD ones too.
Sometimes people just have to learn the hard way in regards to safety. Fortunately for her, she had you to help her learn without having scars as a reminder. A genuine shame she accused you following the incident. Perhaps next time, other individuals will not be so adamant about safety when being aware of her history. That will be an unfortunate day for her skin.
There's a chemical market in Saigon where you can get basically anything, my wife told me there was an article about a cyanide murder where the cyanide was sourced there. The chemicals are transported by motorbike there in unmarked containers. But she told me she wouldn't go there with me to ask for all kinds of stuff because a white guy asking for chemicals there would freak them out :D
0:35 I used to lick leaking fluids from vehicles when I was mechanic.. only the wet ones not the oily ones... this is the quickest way to diagnose a leak source. Usually, there are only 3 options... not including battery acid because that doesn't normally leak
1 condensed water from the air conditioning.
2. screen wash, which contains alcohol and bittrex
3. antifreeze, which is about 20 to 30% ethylene or propylene glycol
💀
I found an article on silver plating in a 50's electronics magazine with instructions for creating a cyanide based plating solution, It then suggested that for safety any excess cyanide should be flushed down the toilet with two flushes!
The degreaser story: the additional ingredient you are talking about is probably concentrated NaOH. I worked at one restaurant which had a "premium" degreaser mix that contained it, and one guy there handled it without gloves. Let's just say he never handled it without gloves again.
10:50 so I looked it up briefly and from the looks of it most grease strips contain a large amount of sodium hydroxide. So no surprise that it would eat through skin like that especially over that much time. Lye is no joke, despite being a household chemical.
4:10 you can still order a lot of stuff online.. just need to know names/ category/ what it's used for. For example Al powder (dye/ coat) or powdered sulfur (used do disinfect beehives)
There is a lot more control though, I imagine if you order 10kg you will have police/ anti-terrorists in your home asking some questions, and/ or the order will be canceled.
Story from my city: uni chemistry class, acid spill not cleaned properly (teacher wasn't notified). Girl sits on a chair, stands up and there are holes in her jeans. And a fair bit of butt damage too.
When I used to live with my sister in law, she was a neat freak that insisted I use bleach when mopping. Including the laundry room where she kept the dogs overnight that would have piss and shit all over the floor that has now turned into ammonia. If I develop lung problems later in life I know who to blame.
14:13 reminded me of the time my mum wanted to buy an literal ozone generator. We have cats and as all animals do, they produce waste that stinks. Some of her collegues recomended her to buy an ozone generator to get rid of the smell. They told her that it works great and even though it smells a bit like metal at the beginning, you don't notice it after a while.
When explained the toxicity of ozone to her she realized that it was a bad idea and also told her collegues about the issue.
One of the rare situations in which a guy yelling at a girl to "Take it off! Take it off!" might actually be appropriate.
Speaking as someone who has both worked in kitchens and done some university-level study in chemical labs! The cleaning solution from the kitchen story is most likely just concentrated NaOH - odourless (so it doesn't taint the food) and easily saponifies grease - possibly with a thickening agent to make it cling to surfaces (for increased time to react). You see similar substances used for hard tops and in industrial dishwashing machines. I can well believe that concentrated NaOH could eat through someone's skin.
Special sauce for kitchen cleaning is usually Grease Stripper Plus, which is basically gelled sodium hydroxide so it sticks to things. Though we also have stuff called carbon off that's basically sulfuric acid...
4:06 Yeah, actually in Mumbai, there is a whole dedicated section of the city for trading chemicals. is popularly called the chemical market
Wow!
0:38
Acetone. It just splashed into my mouth
I would argue that we eat everything we work on, just the stinky ones have smell/flavour at the small quantity that always stay on the hands.
My mom did a lab using scathol (the compound that gives shit it's wonderful smell) and some got on her hand. So for a few hours her fingers smelled strongly of shit.
I have 2 stories from undergrad. The first one happened to my University's lab safety manager during my 8th semester. He had to boil 6M H2SO4 for some experiment. The beaker he was using had a microcrack, causing it to shatter when the acid started to boil. It got all over his left hand and forearm. I saw his hand after his second or third skin graft and he said he would need a couple more and that his hand would never be the same. He now refuses to let the undergrads handle the super concentrated acids so that this doesn't happen to one of them.
The second one happened in my last lab of undergrad. It was for physical chemistry and my professor wanted us to design a fun experiment for our last lab as long as it had something to do with either constant pressure or constant volume calorimetry. My lab partners and I chose to show the reaction behind the baking soda volcano experiment. We had Na2CO3 and 3M HCl (as we couldn't find literature values for acetic acid but ones for HCl). We tested it first in a beaker in the hood to make sure we had the scale correct and to not damage the calorimeter or not have enough to record the reaction. My lab partner (who applied to a Master's program at Yale as a joke and was their top candidate for that program) held the HCl while he dumped in the Na2CO3. Well, the beaker was no where near large enough to contain this reaction. It got all over him and all over the hood. My professor was just staring at us dumbfounded at what just happened. I asked my partner if he was okay and told him he really should wash off. He was okay and just had some minor skin irritation. Thankfully it was only 3M and he was wearing gloves. But we learned the valuable lesson to not let neutralization reactions occur on your skin. And maybe don't hold the beaker you're about to do a reaction in.
Degreaser is a very standard chemical cocktail to have in any commercial kitchen, ESPECIALLY in fast food where deep fryers and grills can potentially leak or spill all kinds of oil and rendered animal fats onto the floor around them. You do NOT want to just let that stuff stay on the floor. For one, it's a massive slip hazard. For two, it's also a food safety hazard, because fats are one of the many favorite foods of multiple foodborne bacteria. The problem is that just plain soap or standard floor mopping solution doesn't have the chooch to cut through that crap. You need something that can chemically break it down and make it more water soluble. That's where degreaser comes in. It cuts through all kinds of fats and oils fast enough to clean it up before it's sat around long enough to be the health & safety hazard it already is. But of course, in order to do so, it has to cut through ALL kinds of fats--including the same fatty acids that make up cell walls. Hence, its ability to dissolve your own flesh if you're careless with it and don't wash it off as soon as it gets on you. It's just a fact of life in the kitchen. If you can come up with something as good as but safer to use, you'll make bank from the entire restaurant & fast food sector. But until then, it's what we have to use to keep commercial kitchens clean.
Source: Have worked in fast food.
At my job, we use a chemical we call stripper to loosen up *all* the layers of wax on a floor to get rid of. My manager at the time told me about how a coworker of hers decided to use that stuff while in her socks. Her skin came off along with the socks.
💀
I'm old but not THAT old (early '80s) and I came up with many of the type of books to which you mention. One that comes to mind is "The Boy Electrician" by Alfred Morgan.
I think it a dereliction of duty that so many parents neglect teaching their children to use just precautions and care while exploring their native curiosity.
As G.K. Chesterton was quoted: "The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder."
Similar experience with degreaser; I work in restaurants and its VERY commonly used. Once I had a personal metal coffee cup with a TON of caked-on coffee rings because I would usually just rinse it out. A manager suggested I use degreaser, so I used some with a scrub pad and it worked like a charm, spent 10 mins or so scrubbing away at it. At this point I started to feel an odd numbness and mentioned it to the manager, who was surprised to find that I wasn't aware degreaser could eat away at your skin and I hadn't been wearing a glove. I was shocked to find out that this stuff isn't sold in grocery stores, but has been in every restaurant I have worked in since, with virtually no training or warnings on it. My hand was vaguely numb for about a week and a half as if I had burned it. On the restaurant note, you would be shocked how many stories I have of people accidentally making mustard gas. I once dated a guy who had walked in on such an incident and when he came home, he said his contacts still burned from it, I was furious that the place he was working didn't take it more seriously, but it was hardly a surprise.
the death hood scores another unsuspecting victim each day
The special sauce was probably lye crystals mixed into a mop bucket. We used to use it in a spray bottle to clean the ovens because it was cheaper and safer than aerosol cleaners, and sodium hydroxide is the main ingredient in oven cleaner anyways.
Safer in that it fumes a hell of a lot less, not that it's /safe/.
"analysis paralysis" got me rolling
Floor stripper is nasty stuff. I used to write SDS for a cleaning chemical company, and floor stripper was up there with oven cleaner on the hazard scale. Both are usually concentrated sodium/potassium hydroxide with a glycol ether (butyl cellosolve) and a flammable isopropanol-water mixture as the solvent.
People really underestimate cleaning chemicals, especially ones that you dilute down from a concentrate. However, they are designed to be used with a rinse and follow-up treatment (for floors).
Fun fact - strong bases react violently with aluminum, corroding it and producing hydrogen gas. We had some reports of ruined doors after stripper was splashed on an aluminum screen door.
That story of the acid and the bra, ouch. Very ouch. Better to get everything off and decontaminate than try to avoid embarrassment and then end up having chemical burns.
No yikes award today though? 😔
I used to be an industry kitchen cleaner (now working in a paint factory surounded by other fun chemicals), i always heard stories about people spilling buckets of caustic soda (sodium hydroxide) on themselves (usually whilst inside the extract duct but occasionally when passing the bucket in or out of the duct, also these buckets would be of varying strength as it was mixed from crystal form) and having to strip off and jump in a sink of soap to wash off or have buckets of soap chucked at them.
However we used to clean the filters from the extraction hoods in a sink of caustic next to a sink of soap to avoid damaging/discolouring the floor with caustic drips, luckily I've never heard of anyone jumping in the wrong sink.
Also i never used to take eye protection too seriously as I wear glasses. That changed after getting an eye full of dirty gritty caustic whilst in a confined spaces about 3 minutes crawling from the exit.
Ps we also used to store bags of caustic soda less than a quarter of a meter away from bags of sulfamic acid (both in crystal form) and after seeing what happens when if you mix them they should have been a lot further away from each other.
Yeah I’m glad you take eye protection more seriously!
@@That_Chemist yeah me too as I nearly blinded myself not long after with boiling caustic ( mixing caustic crystals with boiling water ), luckily just ended up with some scabs on my face for a bit.
Man modern chemists are nothing like the great men and women from the past, What do you mean you dont taste your chemicals?!
I checked out the book you mentioned "Electrical experiments for boys", and made the carbon rod furnace.
I borrowed an ark welding hood from a neighbor and had a great time learning while melting nickles and turning plain dirt into beads of green glass.
That was in the early 60's when chemistry sets had a few real chemicals in them, and most of the kids had a few more brain cells than today's kids.
Can't say I for sure swallowed any compounds I worked with, but after working with acids I consistently had a slightly bitter/sour taste in my mouth which lined up with exactly how I always imagined said acids would taste
I worked in a kitchen where the staff regularly washed the floor with bleach. At some point, someone decided to start adding vinegar to the bleach water, to "help degreasing the floor"...
It went on for a while before I found out why there was a strong smell of chlorine in the kitchen on occasion.
Acetyl hypochlorite
10:55 that's a standard over the counter oven cleaner. those things burn through rubber.
That second story: the chemical safety board liked hearing that
What these videos have taught me is that chemists have the weirdest track record with mouse deaths
Regarding the Pd/C Story, the same thing happend to me. I must have had a really bad day, so I was adding 5 g of dry Pd/C to a 2 liter flask with 500 ml of MeOH, without flushing it with Argon before. And woosh, instant flamethrower out of the neck of the flask. Luckily nothing else caught on fire, but it was a huge mess. Everything was covered with charcoal.
The story about the grease stripper reminds me of my old job at a soda factory. Between products, we'd have to sanitize the carbonation tanks. I looked up one of the chemicals we used for this and the SDS listed 25% hydrogen peroxide, 10% acetic acid, and 6% peroxyacetic acid. That stuff even smelled dangerous, and even when it was diluted for sanitation (about three gallons to about 500 gallons water) it would leave the skin on my arms red and strip all the oil off my skin. I was the only person who wore gloves, apron, and a splash shield handling that stuff, my coworkers always handled it with bare hands. I can never understand that attitude.
work in a kitchen, we've also got grease strip. no idea what it is but it smells STRONGLY acidic. like, "i should step away and not breathe that in" kind of smell. its used for stuff that's got food burned on or just really bad stuck egg. spray it, let it sit (probably don't stand near it) then rinse it off. takes everything off the pan. if it somehow doesn't, try again, and if that doesnt work the pan's garbage. it's crossed my mind a few times like "man we're putting that on the stuff we put food in," but eh, works real good on burned pans that were forgotten in the oven for 8 hours. that was a fun one.
It's likely sodium hydroxide or sulfuric acid or something similar. Corrosive but once it's quenched, not toxic at all.
I’m a mortician and I’m order to get licensed in MN you have to graduate from an accredited program. One of our classes was embalming of course, and using formaldehyde, gluteradlehyde, phenol, and several combinations at various concentrations. We have to do lab safety and bloodborn pathogen training beforehand- but we still had two incidents in the semester I took the class.
One of my classmates was placing a cannula in the carotid artery and as she started injecting fluid into the cadaver the rubber tubing popped off. She was drenched and got embalming solution in her mouth and soaked through her PPE. She immediately got in the drench shower and luckily we had extra scrubs for her to change into and the med schools clinic literally across the street. She got away with just some chemical burns on the roof of her mouth.
Another lab class we were using a chemical called dry wash which is a super intense solvent- we use it as a degreaser and nail polish remover in the prep room. Apparently it dosent play well with some nitrile gloves as myself and a lab partner both got contact chemical burns where the dry wash touched the gloves.
FYI: nitril gloves are usually not that resistant to organic solvents. Acetone for example goes right through them. Usually you can get a list on the sellers page how resistant they are to which solvent/reagent
A friend of mine has an ozone generator. During COVID, after any time that he had anyone over, he would turn it on by plugging it into an outlet near the door with an extension cord and then leave the house for the day, turn it off when he got home, then spend an hour or more working outside or in the garage while waiting for the house to air out. Not sure if it actually helped but he never got COVID